Turk Wars: The Fallen
by Tiger Rhodes
Summary: The remaining Turks are forced to face a world where their past keeps coming back to haunt them... even though their pasts died long ago. Finished! Complete! Done! Read!
1. Default Chapter

Introduction to Turk Wars: The Fallen  
  
The idea for this little exercise in adventure and resurrection came to me when I was, most likely, supposed to be listening to my teacher lecture. In the beginning, it was a simple precident, one of the many truths I held to be self evident in my own little mental constitution:  
  
Fuck, Final Fantasy 7 killed off a lot of the main cast.  
  
I didn't start that way, it actually started for like "fuck, Final Fantasy had a lot of bad guys to kill off." And it did. Tseng, Sephiroth, Rufus, Hojo, Palmer... the list goes on. But then I realized that in no way did the list end their. After all, what about Aeris? What about Cloud's Gonganan counterpart, Zack? And here's where the idea started to form in my mind... I would write a story of resurrection, the return of the Fallen. That was three years ago.  
  
Of course, for that, I'd need a reason why they were suddenly alive and well again, but you'll find that woven, hopefully seamlessly, in the fabric of the plot. I have no plans to spoil it here.  
  
For the past three years, I've turned this idea around in my heads, trying to morph it into something that would be both enjoyable to read, and to write. For two years, I failed. I got quotes in, plot twists, relationships... but with three different attempts to write this book having come and gone, I grew cold on the subject. Apparently, I didn't have the stuff in me that I'd always thought I did.  
  
Enter FanFiction.Net, a place where I've gained a minimal following for a series of Harry Potter stories, and even a few Turk Vignettes when I had the time. Most likely, if you're reading this at all, you're doing it because you wanted to know why the guy who always writes Harry as completely fucked up has written a book about a video game.  
  
But it was with those short stories that I began to realize that I might not suck so much after all. I had only a few bad reviews, ever, usually from people who simply didn't like Harry Potter, and an overwhelming amount of good responses. It was at this point I really looked in the mirror. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and now I knew I could do it in small doses. Could I do it in big ones?  
  
Previous efforts to write an original book have been semi-disastrous and frustrating, I was simply too out of practice in such ventures to get it right on such a large degree. So I returned to my roots, my original writings, and found the old plot outline for the story your about to read. The first thing I did was rip up the ending, an impossibly intricate battle scene that didn't fit my writing style at all. I'm more of a narrative guy, truth be told. The second thing I did was add two new characters, Shea and Rory.  
  
Those of you savvy in Final Fantasy fan fiction will most likely recognize them from the following stories:  
  
Northern Lights, by Tini  
Love Lies Bleeding, by Pip Malloy  
  
If not, then my all means, check them out. They can be found on this site under those pen names, and are absolutely mind rocking. Read them if for no other reason than the fact they supply a good deal of back story for Turk Wars, as does the game itself, obviously. They are, of course, used with permission.  
  
Now onto the meat of it:  
  
While this story is completed, I will be posting the chapters sporadically, most likely a chapter every two or three days or so. I would appreciate it immensely if you used that pause to send in through e-mail or reviews thoughts, ideas, and general impressions you got from the story, the writing style, or anything that strikes your fancy. Flame me if you wish, actually, criticism teaches me what to change.  
  
You may recognize names, words, terms in this story that you can't associate with the video game... homages to the real world and some of the people in it. Original characters- and I stress that term, not Mary Sues- are in here as well, but I did my best to give them a background roll and leave the real action to the Turks, Avalanche, and parishioners of Shinra Co.  
  
Thanks for reading this little foreword, and I truly hope you enjoy the story.  
  
-Tiger  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He was Tseng. Cold calculation wrapped in steely muscles, thick skin, and surrounded by bumbling idiots. A piercing gaze and a steely aim, a touch both sinister and graceful.  
  
"It's cold... isn't it?" the voice hissed in his ear again, the voice of a mix between wild passion and cold simplicity, both high and low, loud and soft. It was a voice that mirrored Tseng's own. But was it even again? He couldn't quite remember. There wasn't much he could. His mind felt lost, hollow, emptier then he could ever remember it feeling. His thoughts eluded him on a gust of wind, as if he was a toddler trying to read the unabridged version of War and Peace... in Latin.  
  
"Yeah, it's cold. So?" he spoke without speaking, had no mouth or lips or tongue to manipulate, to move, no larynx to shape his words, no breath to summon them up from, but he spoke nonetheless.  
  
"So why don't you leave?" the voice hissed to him, leaving a trace of the question embedded in his mind, echoing, even after silence resumed.  
  
"I... can't." Tseng mumbled after some time, struggling to wrap his frazzled psyche around the situation, what was going on seemed more beyond him then anything ever was before.  
  
"You can not what?" if a voice inside your head can coincidingly sound both condescending and arrogant while talking about things that made absolutely no sense to you, this one had mastered the trick in spades.  
  
"Leave. Move." Speak, either, or so he had thought just minutes before, but here he was, answering pointless questions in short, one-word sentences, and with a growing anger. He felt like he was being mocked by something that didn't exist, talked down to by something that didn't even have a body. Not a body that he could see, anyway.  
  
"Of course you can," it hissed to him, and here Tseng almost barked out a retort with several four letter words, but the invisible speaker wasn't done. "You have only to try." No mocking this time, just absolute finality. And then it was gone.  
  
The voice disappeared with a slight pulling feeling, as if it had actually had a physical presence inside his mind, and was now retreating, leaving him alone with his numerous confused and stunned thoughts, leaving rolling echoes and traces in his head. He tried to consider its words logically, or as logically as was humanly possible, considering. The voice- and its words- were wrong, lying or insane, they had said he could move!  
  
But could he? He used to be able to, as did everyone he knew, then, so why couldn't he now? What was wrong, or what had changed?  
  
Tseng didn't know, and for a moment, it was if he almost had to fight to care. He just had this deep rooted, locked up feeling, as if moving was something that lie beyond his grasp. He was dead, wasn't he? Deceased, stiff, expired. Sephiroth has seen to that by gutting him like a blue gill he'd caught at summer camp, leaving him to bleed dry and die in front of a slew of people he hated. He had gasped in his last breath while being watched by a bunch of slack jawed idiots whom he'd have rather killed then spoke to, looked at, and especially died with. He'd felt his very essence ebb away, and all he could do was lay helpless, spread open, on display like some sideshow freak or a biology experiment, blood running him and down the stairs of the temple like a babbling brook.  
  
Of course, even more logically, he couldn't be dead. He was arguing himself- an act which could be identified as odd even without all the moving suggestions from paranormal voices- about whether or not he was living, which meant his functions were working, there was thought going on. Thought requires a mind, a brain, and to the very best of his recollection (recollection being even more evidence to life) Sephiroth had nearly cloven his in two. So either something had changed, something had re-grown, or maybe he was simply wrong. Maybe his entire death had been false, an imagined scene in the Temple, and Sephiroth with the sword and the cutting and the slashing and the bleeding and oh fuck one hell of a lot of pain... maybe it had all been a simple dream, and even he was a dream, his entire life the brain child of some sleeping mental patient. But hell, dreams were fake, and dreams don't think, and he was thinking, and damnit, for thinking there must be life.  
  
And so... he was alive.  
  
The second, the very moment that thought penetrated his fogged up mind, the storm cleared, and the feeling of being tied down fell away with him, taking all traces of and the voice echoes with it. He tried to open his eyes, was hit by a wave of pure green, and slammed his eyelids down at the jolt of a chemical sting. Tseng stopped for a moment, confused, he was surrounded in green, if it was possible to by surrounded by a color. He was surrounded by it, floating in it...  
  
Sinking in it.  
  
Tseng feebly kicked his legs, gathered up his strength, and kicked even harder. He felt a gravity pull that directed up, and kicked again, almost desperately this time. His lungs were beginning to burn, and being that he was supposedly in a damned color, we didn't know whether he could breathe or not. What the fuck is the oxygen content of green, he thought, as he pumped his legs and arms frantically. He was never much of a swimmer, but was rising slowly, almost too slow, but increasingly speeding up, as if a weakening but still present force was pulling at him, dragging him down, not wanting to let him go.  
  
Gasping, he broke the surface, sucked in warm air, and after a moment of bobbing up and down he realized he hadn't been hovering in an actual color, but rather in a thick, translucent green goo. The Lifestream. Still doubted to exist on some parts of the Planet, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary located where Mideel used to be. He was in the god damned, doubted, but obviously real f'ing Lifestream. How he had gotten there, or how he was in one, neat, sewed up piece, however, was beyond him. Just one drop in the bucket of all the things that were beyond him right now, each one pissing him off more then the last.  
  
The sky was bright, painfully so to Tseng's almost fully dilated eyes, but it was pain mixed with overwhelming relief. No massive, overhanging shadow, and this no proclamation of doom and the apocalypse, of death, hellfire and brimstone. No Meteor. The world was not going to end, at least not soon. Those Avalanche bastards had actually pulled it off, saved the world... or had all been killed and someone else had done it. Tseng liked that option a lot more, but some how knew Reno would be disappointed not by who did it, but the fact they'd succeeded, either way.  
  
Tseng gazed around, saw a green-grassed shore fairly close to his present location, and began to swim towards it. He was still half dazed, but was beginning to put his thoughts together, began to solve the jig saw puzzle, and he realized the first thing he had to do was find Elena and the other Turks, needed to get filled in on any and everything he had missed, then, as an afterthought, discover how exactly he was alive and whole. But find the Turks first, because one thing a leader needs to know- and Tseng prided himself especially adept at this- was his underlings, his employees, his co-workers, and he knew that his apparent death would freak Rude, Reno, and Elena the hell out. When your a Turk, your level of being freaked out equaled your level of being pissed off, and both of those factors added up into a sky high body count.  
  
Once he reached land's edge, he realized another aggravating and seemingly unsolvable problem, one more to the dozens- he was nude. This turned out, by some act of the Planet, to be only a temporary dilemma, because there was no one in sight. Tseng merely shrugged his shoulder length black hair back and lifted himself out of the 'stream. The green liquid ran off of his body smoothly, not leaving a trace on his tanned but still pale form, leaving him completely dry under the face of the bright yellow sun.   
  
Tseng ran his hands over his face, forehead, and through his hair. There was no one around him, but he didn't think that mattered as he growled into the silence, "What the fuck is going on here!?"  
  
It was a good question- and a far more emotional one then he was used to asking, but he granted himself the excess feelings due to the extreme duress he was currently under. Usually not an acceptable excuse to him, was stress, but this case was way out there. It was a good question all right, but not one Tseng could answer, and in his mind, that made it a bad question. A really, really, fucking bad question. Not knowing the answer to something confuses you, and being confused makes you illogical.  
  
A Turk, confused, acting illogical, whether he was armed out, in your neighborhood, meant people die. Your neighborhood is gone, about to be smoldering ashes, and you know what you do? You run, you run like the mother fucking wind. But, oh wait, apparently the Planet's population is getting too high, and corpses need to start piling up, because fate presented Tseng with something that confused him all the more.  
  
A set of clothing, perfectly folded and piled neatly, warming in the heat of the day. Underwear, shoes, a wife beater undershirt, and his familiar blue suit. A holster on top, his pistol of choice fitted perfectly inside it, a box of bullets beside that. Glittering off to the side of the pile was a small, golden earring, and Tseng was never quite sure, but he could have sworn it was flecked his red stains that wouldn never come off, that could only be seen when you twisted the item the right way in the glare of the sun. The exact set of clothing he'd been wearing when Sephiroth decided to reconsider his career plan as a Soldier and play butcher instead, but without the rip that ran, Tseng assumed, up and down pretty much every article except the shoes.  
  
Muttering under his breath, Tseng dressed quickly. Too quickly, in fact, he never noticed the long, white- but not so white it didn't blend into his ghostly colored skin- 32inch scar that ran from his crotch to his chin, showing like a blueprint how to open Tseng up, a gory zipper to where Tseng had been vivisected and laid apart. Not too quickly, though, for Tseng to pause as he tried to put on his earring and failed to find the piercing in his left ear. After a moments vain search, the Turk leader merely gritted his teeth and showed the stud of white gold through. It hurt, but Tseng ignored the pain, and concentrated on the task at hand. First step- find the Turks.  
  
Stretching, Tseng stumbled. His joints were extremely stiff, locked up and sore, moving slowly and creakily as if his tendons had been frayed thin and his blood frozen into sludge, as if he hadn't moved in over a year.  
  
The problem was, he hadn't.  
  
***************  
  
Sometimes, life is good, Reno decided, resisting the urge to break into a wide grin. A grossly overweight man with three chins and an undersized bowler hat had just laid down a far too casual challenge for a few hands of 'friendly' poker. This had been brought on, most likely, by the mask of incompetence Reno had been wearing for the past hour. He'd, wielding an 48 card, haggard deck of cards, played Solitaire, asked some random bar main for a few rounds of 'Gym', and he had even dropped his cards and scattered them around the room while shuffling.  
  
Underestimation. It was Reno's crutch, and it was one he'd leaned on his entire life, at least since he'd busted out of the Midgar slums where it was nearly impossible to appear worse off then you actually were. But now, everyone underestimated him. Avalanche had, Corneo had- and aided even more so by a dozen new piercings Reno'd gotten lacing up his ears and one popping from his eye brow- this jackass with a bowler hat was underestimating him too.  
  
He dealt the cards out quickly, using a new, full deck, he'd pulled out from under the table that rested in the dark corner of the bar. He took a quick glance at the hand he'd pulled and hid a smirk behind it. Three jacks stared back at him, flanked on either side by a 6 and an Ace. Reno tossed the digit and dealt himself another card, noting with a wince as his opponent hadn't asked for another card, which was rarely a good sign. Reno flipped his new card up into his hand and visibly twitched as his features dropped in disgust. He raised disappointed eyes to meet Bowler Hat's gleaming ones.  
  
"Would you like to make this a little more... interesting?" the man practically hissed, as if he was actually choking on the greed that laced his throat.  
  
Reno show cased a moment of confusion, raising his eyebrows so high they nearly disappeared beneath his drooping red bangs. "You mean bet?" he damn near squeaked.  
  
The bowler hat bobbed along with its trio of chins companions as Reno's mark eagerly nodded.  
  
"Um... well, OK, I guess..." it was all Reno could do to keep from laughing, he could have fooled himself with the mixture of uncertainty, ambition, and slivers of fear in his voice. Hell, he may have even fooled Tseng.  
  
In a matter of moments, Reno had tricked, badgered, and raised Mr. Bowler Hat up to a wager of gil that was low for an entire night of poker, but deceptively high for one hand. Of course it would still seem low to his opponent, who had no way of knowing it would pay the Rent on Reno's house for a week. How the rich got rich, Reno would never know, and the fact that they stayed rich flat out baffled him. They knew nothing about money, especially when it came to the handling of it.  
  
"Full house, Aces high. Sorry junior," the extra chins were stretched flat by a grin that revealed a row of teeth stained an almost neon yellow from years of smoking high priced but horrible cigars.  
  
Reno blinked intentionally, but was still hit with a wave of real surprise. The guy was better then he thought, had bluffed nearly flawlessly, was perhaps a mild hustler himself. Or he'd gotten lucky and hid it really well. Either way, the mockery in the man's voice made Reno more then a little agitated.  
  
"Uh... all I have is two, uh, two pair," Reno stuttered, digging his shoe heels into the shin of his own leg to keep a straight face.  
  
People standing directly behind Reno laughed, enjoying his little joke more then he did, readying themselves for the scene they knew would follow. Bowler hat reached out to grab the pile of gil, even as Reno's face hardened into a smirk. With cold eyes, Reno tossed his hand face up on the table and slammed his arm down on the money. "Two pair of Jacks," he whispered violently.  
  
The effect was instaneous, with Bowler exploding every way but literally. He leaped up from his stool, kicking over the table and spilling the money as the ring of observers backed up to give the two room. "You hustled me you son of A BITCH," Bowler ended his statement in a high pitched scream, trying vainly to salvage some of his lost dignity. Reno merely grinned in response.  
  
"And you tried to take advantage of a seemingly innocent kid's inexperience," he retorted smugly," I think we come up just about even on the asshole scale. Now pick up my fucking money."  
  
A flash of movement, faster then Reno thought anyone that fat could move, and Bowler produced a Derringer from out of nowhere, a comically small weapon but still close enough in range to spray Reno's... well, anything, really, all over a rack of shot glasses that was poised behind him. The now armed fat man cocked back the compact gun's hammer, too quickly for Reno to back up or even pull out his nightstick for one last desperate shot. Everything in the bar froze for a moment.  
  
"Double or nothing," hissed Bowler.  
  
Reno gritted his teeth to keep from screaming out the contents of the entire dictionary of vulgar words, shook his head from side to side. People were backing up frantically, to both hide and find a nice place to watch the action. No one left to find one of the cops who patrolled the Wutai streets, it wasn't a very nice bar.  
  
"God damnit, I said double or nothing!" spit flew from Bowler's mouth a he shook his gun in what he obviously thought was a threatening manner.  
  
Reno's lip curled in disgust, but of whom he wasn't really certain. Bowler for being such a poor sport asshole (ironically, the fact he was about to shoot him didn't seem as bad as that), or himself for letting his guard down enough to get into this situation. He spat out every word he spoke into his opponent's face, a thousand threats and insults contained in each one. "You have the fucking gun. Take the money, and get out of my sight while you still can, then leave town. Because if I ever see you again you will die, not just die, but die slow. And I'm not putting another dime on this table." This, of course, was only a half truth. Reno had every intent on killing the man if he saw him again, but he only had three gil left.  
  
Reno never got the chance to see whether or not Bowler would have taken his advice, as a soaring disk and a sharp ring of metal on metal stunned them both, and Bowler's Derringer was almost ripped from his hand in a shower of sparks as the metal disc struck it and bounced off. Both Reno and he stared blankly at it for a moment, and then the former Turk exploded into action, dropping flat onto the floor and at the same time curling the contents of his drink into his opponent's face. The alcohol content in that class could have acted as a paint thinner, and it nearly seared Bowler's eyes white. The second Reno felt his back touch the rock hard floorboards of the bar he kicked up, flipping his stool up into the blinded man's arm, shaking the gun loose as it knocked the weapon's wielder backwards. Reno groaned as his back crack, but hit his two feet running and scooped up the fallen table, still on its side from Bowler's tantrum, slamming into the stool and driving both it and Bowler backwards into a bar wall, shattering the wooden stool and damn near knocking the man out. Reno, the table, the shattered remains of the chair, and Bowler all hit the ground at the same time, just a few feet from the gun. Reno was the only one of those to get back up.  
  
The red haired Turk calmly brushed himself off, kicking the Derringer up into his hand and tucking it into his belt even as he produced his nightstick from underneath his jacket. He took a moment to gather himself, then jabbed Bowler in the ribs with a quick shot from his toe. The man groaned and rolled over, staring up at Reno with wide, fearful eyes. His vision was soon obstructed, however, when Reno pressed the tip of his nightstick into Bowler's right eye. The disarmed man hissed out in pain, but made no further move so as not to get his eye ground into his brain.  
  
Reno knelt down by him, giving his Nightstick a quick twist just to see bowler jump. "I could kill you like this," he growled, "one twitch and 40,000 volts of electricity flow directly into your brain. But I would never do something like that to someone who didn't deserve it." Bowler breathed again, until, "And, of course, you definitely deserve it."  
  
For a moment, Bowler was sure the last thing he'd ever see was Reno's cold, hate filled eyes, his lips drawn back to reveal a primal and sadistic smile. And then, "That's ENOUGH!"  
  
Reno straightened up instantly, drawing his nightstick back just in case the need happened to arise to crack someone's skull open with it. He loosened his knuckle white grip on it, however, when he realized the objector was probably the one who'd saved his ass with that metal ring to begin with, some weak stomached pussy who couldn't stand the sight of blood. The young man turned, a grin half-risen on his face, a grin that promptly disappeared. He half opened his mouth to speak, but after a moment of amazingly accurate fish impersonations, he was cut off.  
  
"You!"  
  
Reno couldn't respond for a moment, his mind had just fused. It was one of those Avalanche bastards, those assholes who'd fought him to a stand still a few times, had even taken down Shinra, the biggest and most reliable pay check Reno had ever gotten. He'd figured any one of them would have let him die, or hell, would've joined in on the killing. That's what he'd have done if the tables were turned, even if that report of finding Tseng dying in the Temple was true and they hadn't done it themselves- a thought that Reno readily dismissed. Of course they'd done it. But Reno had years of training to crush his surprise and anger down, and he managed to break out in his patented grin. "Me."  
  
The girl- for a girl it was- narrowed her eyes that has flecks of moth mistrust and anger inside them. She put one milky white hand on a leg brace she wore, and the other on her hip. "What the hell are you doing in my town?"  
  
Reno forced down a laugh, realizing it was better to look intimidating then amused, better to look professional instead of like, well, himself. He took a deep breath and smoothed his hair back, straightened his posture a bit and then exhaled. "My, my... that's bad language for a little girl like you to be using... and your town? Are we trapped in some kind of cowboy movie? I always thought Wutai was more of a kung-fu bullshit culture, but am I in the presence of the mighty Wutai kid? Should I kneel?"  
  
He was answered by a haughty sniff that reminded him of every girl who'd ever talked down to him or declined his invitation for a drink, but the eyes, the eyes were pure ice, a look so cold it even matched Scarlet's in her morning-after mode. "I'm Yuffie Kisargi, lord Godo's daughter! I'll have you know I am the heir to Wutai. Is any of this ringing a bell inside that thick skull of yours or were you off your ass drunk every time that I kicked it?"  
  
Reno's mind went into a kind of computer filing mode, a habit he'd gotten out of ever since the Turks had split up. Yuffie Kisargi, the only daughter of Godo Kisargi, the reigning owner of Wutai. Mother, Kiko Chall, died during child birth. Arrested a half dozen times for shop lifting, currently 17 years old, first class bitch, a virgin, and an A-Cup. "That's a little different then I remember it, sis. I remember you running into a big ass tree after you first saw us and started sprinting in the opposite direction. Thought we were gonna rape you or something, I believe, as if I'd lower mys-"  
  
Reno was cut short as Yuffie lashed out with a vicious smack across his face, half turning him around, just another bruise to pile onto the others. When he turned back he was smiling, but the smile was changed. It was no longer amused, but simply there, lingering and dangerous. "Listen bitch, I'm busy. Unless you have a massive amount of gil, a warrant, or a severe case of nymphomania, I'm not going to bother with you. Fuck, I probably wouldn't anyway."  
  
He turned on his heel and left, ignoring the fallen money along with Yuffies outraged sputtering, knowing that as he walked away her fingers were tightening around the recovered Chakram she'd used to save Reno's life just minutes ago. She wished, just for a moment, that she could bury the killing disc in the back of Reno's skull, cutting his smart ass grin in half... not knowing that he'd have welcomed it. 


	2. Dazed and Confused

The slums of Midgar hadn't changed much, really. The destruction of the twisted city hadn't cleansed the place, hadn't washed out all the evil and corruption that ran like a set of veins through the buildings and the ground and the officials, hasn't filled the gaps with righteousness as some of the scarce survivors had predicted following the near holocaust that had befallen them, or as the raving lunatic priests has shouted in the back alleys all along. Until they had gotten mugged, raped, or killed anyway. The back alleys aren't a wise place to scream things.  
  
If anything, Midgar was a darker, colder, wetter place, with people even poorer thanks to the annihilation of the few possessions they'd had. Now people lived in twisted wreckage and debris instead of abandoned stores. The wetness has never been a problem before, with a massive looming plate up above to act as a shield, but now they'd been under assailant from a near omnipresent drizzle for the last two weeks. A dirty, grimy rain that nourished nothing and left filthy grease streaks all over and drenched those poor people who's current residents were the stone cold streets.  
  
There were two such people lying unconscious in one of those ill fated back alley ways. Neither could have been a month older than 18, and both of them were beginning to stir in the ceaseless downpour, the acidic rain slowly stinging them awake. One of the two was tall, leanly built, but covered in thick, ropy muscles that were pulled tight around his frame. His hair was a blonde so bright it could only be natural with the help of mako, and his eyes only mirrored this with their neon greenish yellow sheen and eerie radiance. His look was topped off with a set of black tattooed stripes that ran up and down his arms, marked in an odd ink that seemed to glow against the glare of the sun. The other was a girl, short, and shockingly thin... years of undernourishment would leave her in that state for the rest of her life. Her hair was a red so dark it was nearly the shade of blood, and it fell around her shoulders as she struggled to sit up.  
  
The boy beat her to it but kept his eyes closed tight, groaning and rubbing his head despite the fact that this was one of the first times in his life he'd woken up without a raging head ache pounding away inside his skull. He wearily lifted his eyelids up a slit, glancing slowly around the alley. "Sweet Jesus..." he breathed, "how blazed did I get last night?"  
  
He peered over his shoulder as he struggled to gain his footing, and registered the young girl he could only assume was spooning him moments before. "Oh shit. Shit. Shit," he repeated, eyes widening, "that is rarely a good sign." Who the hell was this? Did he owe her money? Did he have any with him? Did she owe him money?  
  
He rolled the rest of the way to his feet and backed hastily away as her eyes began to flicker and flutter open. The fact that both of them were totally, utterly naked, with no clothing anywhere in sight, did very little to soothe his charred nerves, but certainly woke up other parts of his teenage body.  
  
She lifted herself with a delicate hand, blinking into the sun light as she came out of her past sleep daze. She stared for a moment as the tall figure stared down at her, waiting for her vision to clear up. "Reno?" she asked.  
  
Even before he had a chance to answer, her vision blurred into focus, and she saw that not only was he not Reno- or anyone she'd ever seen before in her life for that matter- but was completely nude. And, after looking down, she found herself in the exact same situation. She would have turned scarlet if she was the blushing type, but she squeaked again- for she was the squeaking type- and sprinted behind a large green dumpster that was pressed against the wall for protection against the roaming eyes and probably hands of the pervert she was currently sharing an alley with. The boy blinked, surprised, and then tried to glance around the dumpster to see where the hell she'd gotten to. "Uh," he asked, "who's Reno?"  
  
A pair of glaring eyes peered at him from out of the darkness and over the top of the dumpster, before disappearing in a flash. He wasn't sure if she'd blinked or ducked. "No one, never mind." came her reply from her hiding spot. "Go away."  
  
He paused for a moment, stunned. Go away? Was this her alley? And who the hell was Reno? Maybe that's what he'd ended up calling himself last night, he had bad memories of waking up after some 1 am bar hopping with a name tag that read 'Jackie' from earlier that year. But hey, the girl seemed embarrassed, so the scales were tipping towards the no sex factor. Unless she couldn't remember either. Then they had a problem. He lifted himself up on his tiptoes and called over the dumpster in the general direction she'd disappeared. "Uh... what's your name, kid?"  
  
There was no response. Worried that she may have passed out again- or gotten grabbed, this was a Midgar alley- he began circling around her hiding spot. "Hello?" he called out.  
  
She emerged from the massive trash can, popping out of the shadows somewhere to his left fitted loosely in a dirty mini-skirt and an oversized black leather jacket. He raised a single eyebrow, wondering if he'd missed a check or a balance somewhere. "So..." he began, "where'd you get the clothes, kid?"  
  
She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, looking him up and down with an appraising eye, seemingly over her embarrassment now that she had some clothes on. "Behind there. There's a set that will probably fit you too unless your taller then you look. What the hell is this anyway, some kind of a hazing joke? You have some really sick friends. Oh, and my brother's going to kill them. Probably you too."  
  
Friends? He didn't have any. There was always Vincent, his teacher, but he would never- probably could never think of anything remotely like this. He had no sense of humor, and if he did have one, it'd be more of the electrocute a Jewish person with Christmas lights kind. There was the other trainees, but mainly, with the competition being so high for when spots opened in the Turks, the only usual interaction between them was the casual murder attempt. "I doubt that. I doubt all of that. Guess again."  
  
She sighed. She did not want to get into some kind of macho comparison between this guy and her brother. She was above that. And she'd win it, obviously. "Would you mind putting on some clothes, or at least some pants if we're going to talk."  
  
He let out a short laugh, his voice with a few hints of being high pitched. "Sorry if I'm distracting," he grinned, "I guess its kind of like a lava lamp, huh?" He strutted back behind the dumpster, leaving the girl to roll her eyes even as she swiveled them to bemusedly follow his progress.  
  
"Well I don't know," she thought out loud, "maybe it wasn't some of your friends. Maybe someone drugged us. I had some weird dream about being in a hospital... and that's it! Damnit, those idiot Vipers did this. Haha, real funny."  
  
There was a pause as the boy wished she'd shut up and let him dress in the clothes he'd found, even as he wondered who the hell the Vipers were. He called back to her as he stepped into a pair of boxers and pulled them up. "Maybe. And as I asked earlier, a dozen or so times, what's your name, kid?"  
  
He was answered only with a swift kick to the side of the dumpster and Rory was rewarded with the sound of his jumping and slamming his head on the bottom rung of an overhanging ladder, followed by a blue streak of cursing. "Quit calling me kid, asshole." She said in a conversational tone, "My name is Aurora. Who the hell are you?"  
  
He kicked the dumpster back, twice as hard as she had, but did so wearing a smile. "Call me Gabriel. And never do that again, I could have been zipping up for the love of the Planet, and then there would be hell to pay. Hey," he called, "what kind of name is Aurora? Do you go by anything else?"  
  
Aurora glared a twin pair of lazer beams straight through the dark green metal of the dumpster and into the back of his head. "No," she interrupted simply, "my name is Aurora."  
  
Gabriel knelt down to lace up the boots he'd found- an odd combination with the shorts they'd been on top of- and laughed. Sounded like the little lady had something against nick names. Good. Then she wouldn't call him Gabe. "All right then. Who's this Reno guy? Your boyfriend?"  
  
It was then Rory suddenly realized either one or both of them was very, very far from where they were supposed to be. Everyone who'd ever lived or even visited within a ten block radius of the shop she'd called home knew her brother's whole story. Everyone besides the blind, deaf, and dumb for an additional 10 blocks around that. "No," she said with a worried frown on her face, hoping Gabriel would suddenly remember Reno, "he's my brother. He's probably freaking out, so I need to find him. He's high strung enough as it is."  
  
Gabriel emerged from behind the dumpster, pulling a dark blue tanktop over his head where it clashed horribly with his hair for a moment, then popped his arms through the sides. "Do you want some help finding him?" he asked, "I've got no where to be."  
  
Aurora raised an apprehensive eyebrow and gave him a look full of suspicion, folding her arms and basically pulling her entire body into a turtle like defense mode. She was young, but even her short time living on the streets of Midgar had left her far from stupid. "And what," she asked, "oh generous one, would you want in return?"  
  
In an instinctive force of habit that was a borderline between professional scooping and raving pervert, he scanned her up and down with his cool chartreuse eyes, then dealt himself a hefty mental bitch smack. It's called a moral code, he growled to himself, find one ya dick. "How about you let me call you... hm... Rory, huh?" He shot her a grin that had got him his first drink from a bar at the age of 11, got him a women from the same bar three years later.   
  
Rory couldn't help it. She knew this was probably bullshit, but her private little shield cracked down a bit, and she returned his smile. "You are nuts. I really don't know if I like you or not."  
  
He smirked, for if he had a dollar for every time he'd heard that exact remark, he wouldn't have to kill people for a living. "All right then," he said, "lead the way then. Rory."  
  
She rolled her eyes so hard they almost disappeared, wondering whether she'd ever actually agreed to let him call her that. She could always make him stop later, she thought, and started out of the alley, leaving the flickering shadows that had concealed so easily the white spider web of scars that laced up and down her body, and the fist sized seals of dead flesh that paralleled each other on Gabriel's chest and back, surrounding his heart like a pair of prison guards.  
  
*************  
  
A beam of light. Massive, miles long, glowing so bright any who dared to look directly at it were never able to look at anything directly ever again as their retinas were seared off and their pupils shrunk to a pinpoint before completely disappearing, no blind man needs pupils. The beam traveled so fast it sliced the air like a razor blade on skin, exceeding all natural laws known to the race of men simply in it's existence. It was light, and it had the speed of light, and the screams of the unfortunate were heard moments after their bodies had been rendered entirely incapable of making any kind of noise.  
  
An explosion, an entire building reduced to match sticks in a second, a million pieces of kindling whirling around in a fireball and dancing up into the mushroom cloud that loomed above, shadowing the ground even more then the behemoth creature who stood thousands of yards away on the shores of Junon.   
  
The fire. A towering inferno that has appeared from no where, those who had blinked in disbelieve of the Weapon who'd fired upon them missed the single millisecond it had taken for a holocaustal blaze to raze itself and consume any and all in its path.   
  
A man, in more pain then he would have thought possible in the physical world, a pain he'd believed only minutes before was only possible when a part of your heart had been ripped from you before your very eyes and discarded by the ripper as no more than a trifle, and when the ripper was the man who'd given you life and raised you. A pain he'd thought could only exist when your father calmly and carelessly gunned down the women you loved and kicked her body aside, then strictly ordered you to sit down and finish your supper, and don't give him that kind of look. But even in the unbelievable extremity of the agony he was in, it was less than he deserved.  
  
White fire, red fire, fire so hot it seemed to burn clear and sizzle away the very air so there was nothing but emptiness and heat and pain. Fire everywhere, around you, on you, under you, inside you, killing and cremating you in one simple wave of impossible boiling air hotter then magma and even more unavoidable. Boiling air that would reduce him to molecules and mix him with the atoms of all those who'd died around him and with the building that had been built only to honor him.  
  
Rufus felt himself falling, spinning, collapsing and convulsing in mid air, in a downward spiral of darkness and a soulless, merciless pain, the floor beneath his feet swept away as a mere handful of white hot ash, his body was lit up with fire and agony as it was sizzled to nothing in the pure energy blast of the Diamond Weapon, a hell storm of pain as a crunch so loud it deafened him rang out, and Rufus would never know whether or not the sound was the building he was in or he himself... and then...  
  
The newly appointed president of Shinra sat up in a start, a sheen of cold sweat glistening on his skin and matting his hair down hard against his forehead. The melancholy chorus of crickets rang out all around him, wet and dewy grass lie beneath, a dark canopy of dark green leaves crowning the sky above, and a chill that pierced him like an arrow. Rufus looked around frantically, with blurred and half misted eyes. He was in a shadowy forest, and it was a wet and freezing cold shadowy forest at that. There was no Weapon, Diamond or otherwise, no fire, no imminent and untimely death for Rufus. "Wha..." he blurted, trying to raise out of his stupor and out of the vice grip of his dreams, "Where the fuck am I? Who...?"  
  
Rufus rose shakily to his feet, noticing what may have once been shoes hung in straps on his feet, and wincing at the sound of his joints cracking in strain. He was the sole owner of a multibillion gil company, he had the entire legion of Soldiers at his beck and call for Bahumat's sake, there was no actual reason for him to ever do any physical moving at in his entire life. He should not have a skeleton that sounded like an antique toy chest.  
  
The sound of whistling coming from behind him jolted his system suddenly, and he spun around, ripping his 12 gauge loose from its holster and raising it dead even with where an average sized man's Adam's apple would be bobbing. The blackened barrels of his gun came up level at pin point range... with the knot hole of a ficus tree. Rufus glanced around warily, breaking out a light sweat despite the icy temperatures of the room, and pulled his gun back to his side, wondering if he had simply misheard the wind flowing through the ultra thick, completely light-blocking forest roof. There was a moment of total calm- a rarity in the young president's life- then a clamor of plants being savagely knocked aside and tramped down rang out, and he readjusted his aim for whatever wild animal would come charging out at him through the thicket with horns or tusks or what the hell ever lowered, wishing that Rude or Tseng or even Reno was here with one of those massive revolvers they always carried around on their hips. And in their boots. And inside their jackets.   
  
Instead of a boar or a bear, or one of those mako mutated freak animals who ran around, however, he was met with a broad shouldered, darkly tanned, spiky haired individual walked casually into the clearing, a mammoth sword reflecting the sun off of the shoulder it was slung over, whistling some non-sensible tune to himself. The whistling dropped away into nothingness when he saw a fully alert Rufus train a fire arm between his eyes, but he managed to remain a calm demeanor as he raised a hand in greeting. "Hi, uh..." he said, "ya finally woke up, huh... uh, scientist dude?"  
  
Rufus coughed to clear his voice, realized for the first time his tongue was dry as dust and he more thirsty then he ever was before in his life, and he coughed again, taking a few quick steps back to get fully out of range of the man's 6 foot long sword, boring his eyes into Zack's just waiting for him to make some kind of sudden move. "Where," he spoke slowly, as if talking to an idiot, "have you taken me?"  
  
The smile that was plastered across the man's face faltered a bit, but didn't drop away completely, and his beetle black eyes didn't dim down. "The name's Zack. I didn't take you anywhere, I woke up and saw you lying somewhere over there out cold. If ya want to know where we are, you'll have to guess yourself, cause I don't know, and you're the scientist. Aren't they supposed to be good at figurin'' this stuff out?"  
  
Rufus was in complete and total awe. All kinds of new things and interesting firsts were happening to him today, but the most surprising one so far was the way this farmer looking man spoke to him, as if he was some kind of equal. There was no way this... Zack, didn't recognize him, he knew he wasn't looking his prim and proper best, but even the poorest and most out of touch hermit in the furthest continent of the planet knew cell for cell the face of the boy President of Shinra. The teachings that had been driven and pounded into his maturing mind as he grew had told him to always look dignified and in control, no matter what was going on, but the stress of his situation formed his expression into something he was fairly certain looked less then respectable. "I'm not a scientist for Bahumats sake!" he snapped, voice just a decibel or two below a scream.  
  
Zack's smile disappeared from his face in a flash as if Rufus had struck him, and if he was currently trying to conceal his emotions to the slightest degree he was much worse at it than Rufus was, his eyes were narrowed into intense little slits, and his already deep breathing deepened, his breath switching to the sound of a bull's as it pumped in and out from between his clenched set of teeth. Rufus took one more look at the large, white knuckled fist that hung on either side of the man and decided it was time to start being a little nicer and a lot more polite. Zack snorted, "I've told you my name. Tell me yours."  
  
Rufus' eyes nearly bugged out of his skull. That was no longer indifference, that was an order, to him! He'd only met one person before in his entire life who hadn't known who he was, and she- well, that was years ago, before he'd taken over Shinra. That was tolerable then, but this was all out insolence! For some one to not know who he was now was... inconceivable, although it wasn't near as confusing as it was angering. "I am the president of Shinra," he growled out, knowing it wasn't a smart thing to do, "and you can't tell me to do anything!" If any of you have younger brothers or sisters and your baby-sitting them, you'd know the exact tone Rufus was using, just deepen it with 10 years of age.  
  
Zack jerked up his sword suddenly, readjusting his grip and bringing the sword back into the perfect position to lop Rufus' presidential head clean off and spray his lifeblood onto the leaves that bedded the forest soil like a crude carpet. For a moment his muscles tensed like he was going to strike, but then he glanced around the forest as if he expected to see someone watching him, and barked out a strained, derisive laugh. "Yeah right. The president is some big fat guy in a red suit."  
  
This time Rufus allowed himself a short laugh, glad to be in the company of someone talking down about the son of a bitch who used to be a father until Sephiroth used him as a pin cushion, but was still very pissed off about this man having no idea who he really was. "The president," he began, "was a big fat guy in a red suit. That president was killed over a month ago by some mental patient who carved him up like a holiday turkey; with a sword even bigger than yours, if you can believe that. I... am his son."  
  
The Gongana Soldiers face rippled with a wave of a dozen different emotions, the biggest on of which was definitely shock. He mouthed wordlessly for a moment, working his jaw to no effect, before finally breathing out a legible sound. "R-Rufus?"  
  
Two distinct thoughts rushed into Rufus' mind in the following second of Zack uttering his name. The first one was a sense of relief that this man did indeed know who he was, an the other was that the one he'd been conversing with had definitely been a Soldier 1st Class at one point, because only one with that kind of skills could move at the speed that exceeded the blink of an eye and done it with such precision otherwise, excersising a move that ended with the massive silver sword Zack wielded pressed up against Rufus' jugular, just a hair-breath from severing flesh and then artery and making certain the president bled dry over several long, painful hours in this very forest.  
  
The expression Rufus had first seen on Zack's face had undergone a total 180, gone was the placid welcoming and confident calmness, present was a jittery kind of hatred that reminded Rufus of Palmers anger and a curled upper lip, the Soldier's already heaving breath deepened to the point of some kind of prehistoric beast and Rufus could feel it like a whirlwind against his face. Veins popped out of the formerly unwrinkled forehead so a degree it appeared as if someone had sketched a road map across it as Zack spoke, punctuating every word separately as if actually choking on his rage. "Give. me. one. reason. I. shouldn't. kill. you. right now."  
  
Rufus heard the words clearly, but suddenly he found himself having trouble concentrating, trouble focusing on what was going on around him. The image of Zack and the mammoth sword he held kept blinking in and out of focus before staying at some kind of dimmed blur. Blood rushed into Rufus' head but only served to make him more dizzy, and he staggered, and only Zack quickly yanking the sword back saved Rufus from effectively slitting his own throat as he collapsed, landing in a heap on the ground with the sound of his heart beat raging in his ears, and was still.  
  
The president lay there for a moment, teetering on the verge of consciousness, mind swimming and shaking around in his skull, unable to focus, to move, even to breathe. He didn't have the strength or the will power to exhale, and he was going to die with his lungs full of air. And then, just as suddenly as it had struck him, the spell passed away. Rufus' eyes fluttered warily open, staring blankly at the forest canopy, and then locked onto Zack, who still had the look of anger on his face but it was no longer laced with psychosis, and the Gonganan native extended a blue gloved hand to Rufus, who paused a moment before grasping it tightly. "Give me..." he panted, groaning, "one reason why you should."  
  
Zack hauled him to his feet with one flex of his rippling biceps, but didn't lower his weapon... not entirely anyway. The glittering point was still lined up with Rufus' midsection in a close enough proximity to drive it all the way through in a second. His eyes were still narrowed but had far less confusion or hate in them, and Rufus could have sworn there was some actual concern behind there. "I was one of your damned guinea pigs," Zack growled, anger momentarily surging, "they found me cut up in one of your damned mako reactors and wired me up like a freaking lab rat."  
  
Rufus blanched, thinking hard, but whenever he tried to call up a memory more then five minutes old all he saw was a blank screen raging with flames, flickering and raging in a vision so real he could almost feel his forehead break out in a sheen of sweat. Hojo and his scientist coterie could have been doing unauthorized work, which wouldn't be altogether unheard of. Oh hell, it wouldn't have even been uncommon. "How long ago did they let you out?" he asked, "I mean, I've only had control for a few weeks now, and my father already got what he had coming to him for anything that was done to you... the son of a bitch. Or did you-"  
  
"-I escaped," Zack cut in. Rufus nodded, his eyes never straying from the Soldier's sword and its razor sharp edge that only a minute ago had been ready to strike him down, and had to fight to keep the anger down, the rage at ever being seen so helpless, and was struggling even though his life depended on it.  
  
"All right," the president prompted, "you escaped." He was just babbling, looking randomly for words to say now, and drawing a blank, studying the exact distance every word he got out caused the silver weapon to dip, to droop towards the grounds just a little, just an inch lower. "But when? I mean, what date??" His shaking hand stilled as it tightened around the handle of his gun.  
  
Zack had to think a few moments before answering, thrown off by some weird daydream about getting shot off the back of a pick up truck... or was it after he got out of the truck? He remembered some blonde kid who'd always followed him around in Soldiers training, had even styled his hair the same way. They'd been friends, he thought... went on missions together? It was all fuzzy, and was mixed with the conflict of what he'd do with- or to- Rufus if he turned out to be the real president and just not some psycho impersonator. He didn't want to kill him, not anymore, at least, but he felt that there was something wrong with just letting the man walk away skotch free after all they'd put him through in the lab. The lab... how had he escaped from the lab? It was feeding time when they'd done it, and the blonde kid had done some weird trick with a scalpel, Clim-something or other, split his holding tube, then split a scientist or two. Then what, he wondered. They'd high jacked a pick up truck... there was the truck again! Why was his dream tied in with what really happened? Wasn't he... weren't they...  
  
"Zack!"  
  
The Gonganan snapped out of his trance suddenly, blinking his piercing black eyes a half dozen times and looked around as if he'd forgotten where he was, too distracted to even notice Rufus's gun now hung at his side instead of dangling behind his back. "What?" he asked, annoyed at being distracted from finding the answer her needed.  
  
"What date?" Rufus repeated, looking Zack over, wondering if he'd just got hit with the kind of dizziness spell that had hit him, and concluded that if he had it had been a weaker version. No one would have been able to stand up to that, especially no farmer spawn handling it better then he had, Soldier or no, which Rufus was once again beginning to doubt.   
  
"I don't know, OK!" Zack snapped, mind still half trying to grasp the question he'd tried to answer moments ago, a question he'd somehow already forgotten. "Four, maybe five days ago."  
  
Briiiiing! Panic! Panic! Emergency shut down system coming online, water secretion at 79%, adrenaline on overdrive!!! Rufus almost reeled at the force of the panic alarms going off in his head, and he momentarily shut his eyes, to both calm himself and try and think up something to stall his imminent end. He had to get Zack distracted before blowing him away, or they'd die together, one from a bullet and the other from a stab wound. 4 or 5 days wasn't long enough ago, he'd been in charge for over a month, and had even told Zack that, hadn't he? He stuttered, just looking for the chance to raise his two barrels and make the Gonganan a foot shorter. A foot and a half, really, if you counted the hair spike that jutted out like some kind of a compass needle. "But what date, man!?" he burst out, trying to keep his voice steady and unworried but failing miserably, knowing it didn't matter due to the beads of sweat running down his pale complexion and gathering on his shirt collar.  
  
"I-don't-know," Zack replied, wondering if Rufus thought they'd given him a calendar inside his test tube or something. 'Welcome to the Lab suite, with breakfast in tube, calendar in tube, and free cable in tube.' "The 28th... uh... or the 29th? I really don't know how long I was out before they found me."  
  
Rufus fixed him with a blank stare, gawking for a moment. The 28th or the 29th? he thought, is this guy some kind of blank out from the Wutain war? One of those Soldiers who came back with dull eyes and hallucinations? It was only the 21st today, and Rufus doubted even in a lab you could mistake a week for nearly 30 days. Obviously this man was a lunatic, and an armed one at that. The young president silently cocked his gun and thumbed off the safety in what appeared to Zack as a simple shift of weight. The lessons his father had forced down his throat has turned out important after all, but he needed to keep talking to distract Zack from the motion of his finger wrapping around his gun's trigger. "Really?", he asked, preparing to bring his weapon up right under Zack's chin. "And what month was this?"  
  
Zack gave him a look as if he was the lunatic. Inwardly, he thought, even a Shinra president could figure out the answer to that question. Last month... weren't there supposed to be some of the most brilliant tutors on earth working for these people, or was it as Zack had first suspected, that this was just some raving lunatic with blonde hair and a white coat? The look the man was giving him was peculiar and Zack couldn't quite read it. "July," he prompted Rufus, "1999... are you with me here?"  
  
Rufus froze in mid sweep of his arm, stopping the tip of his gun level with Zack's knee and choked on a laugh. "1999?" he smirked, laughing, "Heh heh heh... buddy, you're a year off."  
  
There was a moment of absolute silence following that simple statement, and Rufus would have sword that even the omnipresent chatter of the birds and the bugs and the little jungle animals that had been running around has finally ceased. The brief period silence was following, predictably, by even more silence, until Zack managed to come up with the most brilliant and unique thing a person can say into response to an accusation like that. "...what?"  
  
The president smiled, coldly, disarming his gun as he did so. This man wasn't dangerous, he thought, he was simply an idiot. But he was a fast, strong, good natured idiot, and that meant he could be easily bent to Rufus' will and used to help him get the hell out of this forest. He forced his smirk into a pained grimace of warmth, then realized he looked kinder if he simply had a straight face on. "Nothing, nothing at all. What do you say we combine forces and get the hell out of here, its kind of hot."  
  
Zack shot him a startled look, with a little suspicious underneath, but Rufus knew he was safe now. Enough talking had transpired for an emotional chord to start, one that wouldn't allow Rufus' jugular chord to be severed, at least not by this man. "Don't worry," he said, "I was instated after you escaped, and all projects cruel like that have been swiftly discontinues." Then, without another word, the president swept his scorched coat as he turned, and tramping though a stretch of bushes, left the clearing. Zack stared after him for a minute, shaking his head, and then followed. 


	3. Knock Knock

Tseng took a deep breath and wiped his hair from his eyes before pushing open the cowboy style swinging doors and entering the bar, bracing himself against the onslaught of smoke filled air and the reek of alcohol that was so reminiscent of Reno's apartment; wondering if he should be wearing a pair of boots with spurs, an idiotic 10 gallon hat and a six shooter. Screw it, he figured that his Colt automatic would be just fine if a shoot out were to break loose at high noon.  
  
A pair of skinhead redneck looking teenagers were passing a poorly wrapped joint back and forth between them, but they were far too out of it to even notice another person had entered the room, let alone anything strange that person would have to do and the room was otherwise empty, excluding the pretty young barmaid who was wiping down the counter. Tseng took another quick look around just is case and then walked over to her, trying to look as casual as possible with his imposing, out of place blue suit that bulged where his pistol lay concealed. He wore a false but very convincing grin as he leaned over the counter, sliding onto one of the bar stools. "Hello," he said, quickly reading the name tag pinned to the waitresses shirt. "Royce. Would you happen to know where I can find a women named Elena?"  
  
  
The young lady shot him a glare saturated with suspicion and gave him the same look over he gave people he was about to send to the floorboards with a sucker punch. Her stare lingered pointedly at the location of his firearm and then wandered upwards to meet   
his eyes. "The boss isn't in right now," she said, "care to leave a message?"  
  
Tseng's left eye twitched behind his newly stolen sunglasses in a habit that could symbolize both surprise and irritation. He hadn't know Elena owned this place, the man in the materia shop had simply said this was where she worked, although it was an inevitable fact of life that people held at gun-point were not usually detail oriented. He fixed his gaze to piercing and pulled off the glasses to reveal that fact to the waitress, who surprisingly didn't even flinch. "I know she's still here," he whispered, voice dropping to a deadly softness, but Royce Pandora met him still with an icy look before turning her back on him and simply began walking away.  
  
The Turk quickly reached out and grabbed her by the shoulder, and she swiftly smacked his hand away, but looked in his direction again which had been his original intent. His gun had been silently drawn and was now cocked and pointed directly between her breasts. She didn't react right away, and Tseng wondered if he'd have to just shoot her and go looking for himself, but then she sagged her shoulders and let out a long sigh. "Right," she said wincing, "the gun. Always with the gun. Why is it always the gun with you people? Ell is in the back, but I wouldn't go waving that thing around her if I was you, you wouldn't live long enough to regret it."  
  
Tseng allowed himself a small smile as he remembered the ditzy, over-talkative girl he'd asked out to dinner and tried to imagine her some kind of fear inspiring hardass killer. She'd been hired to fulfill Reno's Soldier recruitment duties and that was it, so he doubted there was anything she could do but scream in response to a gun being pulled on her. This was something he had to see.  
  
He put a leg up on the counter and spun himself around, dropping back to the floor on the other side and ignored the look of indignation he was receiving from Royce. Tseng merely shrugged his shoulders at her and walked back into the hallway leading towards the back of the bar, seeing only one door up ahead. He pointedly ignored the word 'private' which had been seemingly cut into it and slipped in without knocking after silently twisting the knob, breathing deep in relief at the suddenly smoke free air, then choked on that breath at the scene that lay before him.  
  
Elena stood with her back to him, stooped over a large desk that covered one entire wall of the cramped room, but he knew it was her due to the familiar blonde hair that hung down around her ears, and she was counting veritable heaps of gil, what appeared to be the amount Tseng made in a year, and was treating it like pocket it change. It was then the Turk realized they probably sold more then booze and food here, and the two punks in the front had probably just been sampling the house special. So that waitress Royce had meant 'burn-out druggy' when she'd said 'you people.' Tseng didn't take offense though, he knew how pale he looked.  
  
Elena must have heard him choke because she stood suddenly straight and wiped her hands on her shirt, a handful of gil clenched tightly in her fist. "Hey Royce," she called out, "I'm getting your paycheck right now, just hold on for a few minutes..."  
  
Tseng sighed at the non-preferential homecoming, being mistaken for a bar maid drug dealer named Royce with an attitude was not what he'd hoped for. He cleared his throat before speaking, "...Elena."  
  
In a sudden flash he was blinded, a flurry of gil striking him in the eyes and scattering around the room as Elena spun around, a gun appearing in her hand so fast it was if it'd come from inside her jackets sleeve. Tseng's vision cleared as a click rang out, symbolizing the weapon in Elena's hand was now cocked and armed. "Don't move", she growled, "not one fucking inch."  
  
Tseng didn't, but wouldn't have even if she'd told him too. He couldn't, he was stunned, frozen, staring at Elena as if he'd never seen her before. The childish innocence that had made her so beautiful was gone, replaced with cold, flashing eyes, a kind of wild fierceness, and a lipstick so red it rivaled the kind Scarlet wore. She now held her gun with an experts confidence, no longer gripping it in two uncertain, shaky hands. Everything in the room froze, her waiting for the intruder to speak up and him waiting for her to put a lead slug in his face. "Tseng..." she breathed after a time, her blue-gray eyes widening but not warming.  
  
Letting out a sigh of relief, Tseng stepped forward to grasp her in his arms the way she always wanted him to after a big fight or a narrow escape, expecting her to leap into his grip and squeeze him until his ribs cracked. Instead Elena snapped forward, pushing his right shoulder back and jabbing her gun at him like a dagger. "I said don't move!" she yelled, brandishing the nails on her free hand like claws.  
  
Tseng recoiled back, hitting the wall and gasping as he felt an exposed nail puncture his skin directly to the left of his spine. He managed to choke down a scream of pain but had to speak through tightly gritted teeth. "Elena, please..." he hissed, "calm down and put the gun-"  
  
"Who are you!?" she interrupted him, face gone deathly pale, and the steady grip she had clamped onto her gun began to lessen as her hands shook. "How do you know my name!?"  
  
Tseng took one quick step forward to dislodge the nail and then instantly grabbed his back to apply pressure to the wound. The pain was amazing, and Tseng could tell the nail had been covered with rust and god knows what. He'd need a tetnis shot, that much was obvious, he just hoped he didn't start hallucinating. "Elena'" he said again, beseechingly,   
  
"I know your name because I know you. Its me, Elena, Ts-"  
  
"No!" she cut him off again, her voice teetering on the edge of hysterical, and then she spoke just a fraction calmer, "no... Tseng is dead. Tseng is gone. Your aren't Tseng."  
  
"Elena, I-" Tseng pleaded, truly worried now.  
  
"No!" she repeated, and this time she was screaming, and after jabbing her gun at him one more time she wrapped her finger around the trigger and closed her eyes. Tseng instantly recognized the nervous habit she'd developed before firing, and leapt forward, leaving go his puncture wound and backhanding the gun just as fired, going wide of his head and blowing a hole in the wall. Tseng pressed forward and slammed Elena into the opposite wall, and pinned her arms against it by her wrists to hold her still. She kicked at him and bared her teeth like she was going to bite him, so he did the only thing he could think of to get her to recognize him. "Elena," he asked, "would you like to go to dinner?"  
  
The blonde Turk stared at him, wide eyed and in awe, before doing what she had resisted all along and met his eyes. Instantly Elena went slack in his grip, and when he released her she fell forward into his arms and the hug he'd expected to begin with took place. Her shoulders started to shake, and it took Tseng a minute to see that she was crying.   
  
"Elena?" she asked, confused, trying awkwardly to comfort her by running a hand through her hair.  
  
"Oh Tseng," she sobbed, "What...? How?" She pulled away from him with a face filled with confusion, staring at him as if he was some divine being, jaw dropped. Tseng merely shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, hair sweeping from side to side.  
  
"I don't know," he said honestly, "I guess it just kind of happened, but I plan to get to the bottom of it. But... where's Reno, and Rude? They're all right aren't they, I mean, how long have I been... away... for?"  
  
They were interrupted by a sudden knock on the door, and an anxious voice called out from the other side. "Miss Elena? Are you all right? I heard a shot..."  
  
It was Royce, the waitress. "Yes, yes," Elena called back. "I'm fine."  
  
A loud sigh of relief rang out, along with the sound of a knife sliding back into its sheath. Tseng was surprised that the bar maid was loyal enough to Elena to go after a man with a gun wielding only a kitchen blade. "Oh good... I don't usually worry, but that guy... he looked dangerous. I'm glad you shot the asshole."  
  
Elena opened her mouth to correct Royce but Tseng lifted a finger, a familiar gesture between the two of them when she was talking too much. He nodded his head at her slowly, and drew his finger across his throat. Yes, you shot me. Elena gave Royce an affirmation and the waitress left. Tseng smiled wryly. "She's nice."  
  
Elena gulped, obviously not detecting the faint trace of humor in his voice. "Royce doesn't mean anything by it," she said hurriedly, "she just doesn't like men. She was raped when she was a little girl and-"  
  
Tseng waved off the explanation. "That's fine," he said, "it isn't important. What is important though, what I really need to know, is what I've missed? Where is everyone, and why are you working here??"  
  
"Well..." Elena breathed, clearing her suddenly thick throat. "I think we'd better sit down, there's a lot to tell. Lock the door so Royce won't interrupt, will you? Thanks..." and so they sat, and Elena talked, telling the story of Avalanche and Meteor, of how Reeve of all people was now was a high ranking emloyee in the charge of Shinra now that all his superiors were dead and all evidence of his betrayal destroyed. He had, of course, been put to the task of rebuilding the damaged slums. She told him how there wasn't enough money for Reeve to fix up his precious slums thanks to the cost of reconstruction. She told him that though Avalanche had basically slipped out of public eye they were still kept tabs on, so she knew that Cloud and Tifa had settled in Cosmo Canyon, that Barret had rebuilt North Corel, Cid had retired in Rocket Town, Yuffie had returned to Wutai... although Red XIII and Vincent had simply disappeared after their first public appearance.  
  
After a while Tseng had to cut in. "Yes, yes," he said shortly, annoyed that anyone- especially Elena- would have taken such a vested interest in a pathetic band of misfit 'heroes' like Avalanche. "But what about us? What are you doing in Kalm right now? Where's Rude and Reno?"  
  
For a moment he though Elena was going to start crying again, but she merely swallowed once, then twice, and then continued talking. "Well... we... after you, well, you know, we couldn't keep going. Not that it would have mattered much, Reeve hated us all anyway, but we just didn't feel right. Even if we had felt fine about it your the only man we could ever follow. I did think for a while Reno would try and keep us together but he just went all quiet and was the first to leave. He lives in Wutai now, though I'm not sure why.   
  
Probably because its the furthest country from the Temple there is. Rude moved in some Junon apartment and he's a bouncer at one of their night clubs. And I moved here and..."  
Tseng fixed her with a disapproving gaze. "Deal drugs," he supplied.  
  
She looked horrified for a moment, as if she might try to deny it, but then she slowly nodded. "Deal drugs. I have some friends here who set me up... and I sent some invitations for Reno and Rude to come when business picked up, but neither one responded either way. I guess they don't want anything to do with me... or each other."  
Tseng was stunned. Rude and Reno with an entire continent between them? They'd been like brothers, refusing to go on a mission without the other. They split drinks, an apartment, probably women as disturbing an image that was. They'd been friends since the first day they'd met on their inaugural day as Turks when Reno had punched out the presidents personal assistant for calling him 'carrot top'. "Well," Tseng managed to say slowly, "we'll just have to get them here. Are you sure they're still.."  
  
"Alive?" Elena asked. "Yeah. Once Reeve took over and read all of the president's filed he released the entire Turk folder- minus Vincent's old files of course- to the press. Now we all have multi thousand dollar gil bounties on our heads and outstanding warrants from Nibelheim to here and everywhere in between. Even you, because we never managed to find your body. It'd be front page newspaper quality if any of us was ever taken out."  
  
Taking a deep breath, Tseng nodded. "All right," he said, "all right. We'll have to get them. We can start things going again, but we will need money..."  
  
"I've got that covered. Interesting thing about this business is if you skip buying a shipment your a few hundred grand up but have no more income." Elena said, tilting her head thoughtfully.  
  
Tseng nodded. "All right," he said, "I'll need a phone."  
  
***************************  
  
Reno stretched out and leaned back is his recliner, placing a cold wet rag on his forehead and letting out a long, deep breath, sliding his eyes closed, just hoping the pain killers would kick in before the sleeping pills did. They always gave him a mild buzz, or maybe that was simply the absence of agony jolting through every part of his system. He sunk lower in the chair, letting three of his four limbs hang off the edges of it and groaned, more to block out the monotonous static of his broken TV than to signify any particular pain.  
  
A sudden knock came crashing on his door, jolting him upright and bringing back the head ache he'd managed to kill off with a half bottle of Aspirin and a couple shots of Vodka a half hour earlier. Reno knew only one kind of person in the world knocked that loud, and he realized in the time it took him to kick a wad of gil and a gun under his couch that the Avalanche bitch must have sicced the cops on him.  
  
Now he knew that he hadn't done anything technically illegal in Wutai... yet, so he decided not to make a run for it, but he did turn his nightstick up to full power just in case. At that electricity level he could cook himself a Pig- badge and all- for dinner in a little under a minute. The knock came crashing, slamming again, but a very non-authoritative, non-masculine voice came from the other side of the door. "Reno!" it screamed, "open the gawd damned door or I'll cut it off its hinges!"  
  
Reno could have laughed in relief. It was only the Avabitch herself, probably trying to give him the gil he'd left behind or some other stupid PMSy good-doer cause like that. He took a few easy breaths to lower the pulse rate that had just jump started into the triple digits and pulled open the door just as Yuffie was about to hit it with another round of ear-splitting knocks, but she didn't have his gil- or any gil for that matter- with her, and in fact she had nothing at all. The red haired Turk waited expectantly for her to say something as she started, realizing she'd gone there for a reason and leapt into action.  
  
"Reno!" she screamed, shoving him backwards and sticking her finger right in his face, "what are you doing in Wutai!?" Caught off guard, Reno tripped on a discarded stool and stumbled back, but quietly regained his footing and smacked her finger away, malevolence filling his bloodshot eyes, and for a moment Yuffie thought he would hit her, and she even raised her shield bearing arm to defend herself, but Reno stayed perfectly still... he actually seemed to be looking over her shoulder, studying something behind her.  
  
Finally his calculating gaze drifted over to her, and he smiled coldly, scanning her face for every last detail as an old habit from Soldier recruitment's. "How about," he said in an entirely monotone voice, "you take about six steps back, and Ill answer anything the hell you want."  
  
Her anger seemed to break in the face of Reno's bizarre statement, and she took a quick glimpse over her shoulder as if she expected Rude to be standing there with a cocked Mag., and then looked back at him with a face with confusion sketched in every line. She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then looked over her shoulder again. "Wha... huh?" she asked.  
  
Reno's smile widened, his eyes flashing triumphantly, losing his defensive stance and taking on a much cockier pose. "You," he said slowly, relishing each word, hoping to god his hunch was right but at the same time wondering if it'd really be bad if she simply broke his neck with one of her stupid ninja kicks, "are trespassing, Miss Kisargi. You are in my house on my property and you were not invited in, and as far as I can see you don't have a warrant with you... so get off these floorboards. Unless you'd like me to search you for one..."  
  
There was a moment's pause as Yuffie figured out what he meant, and then a moment's more as she considered running him through her Gauntlet ninja strike, but the short brunette only glared at him in disbelief for a moment before turning on her heel and marching over the doorstep she'd just passed through, then turned back around and practically screamed, "THERE! Are you HAPPY now you crack smoking little freak? Now. What. Are. You. Doing. In. My. T-"  
  
"I live here," Reno interrupted quickly but quietly, a real smile on his face now instead of his sardonic leer, even though he knew nothing good would come from taunting or provoking the daughter of Godo in the city he ran, but not really giving a damn. He hadn't really given a damn about anything in a long time, besides getting as comfortable as possible before his lungs collapsed under the coating of tar or around the puncture wound of a 38. slug.  
  
"Funny," Yuffie hissed, "real funny, smartass, but I'm being dead on serious here. What are the Turks business in my town, huh? Are you going to try to rob the new materia store?? Take a crack at killing my father? Tell me! If you don't you know I can get the entire town guard in here in a second."  
  
Reno froze, staring at her in awe, wondering if she could truly be as ignorant as her last string of questions would imply. That son of a bitch Reeve had made damn sure to mention in that information that had been 'accidentally' leaked to the police that the Turks should be looked for separately. "Well..." he managed to get out, lost for words for one of the few times in his life, "first of all, I think you should know this 'my town' bullshit is really funny, just damned cute, ya know? The only way this will be your town in this decade is for someone to actually take a shot at your father... which does explain why you jumped to that so quickly."  
  
"Secondly, he continued as Yuffie was about to sputter some outraged retort, "the last job the Turks ever went on was searching for Seven's body. You do know Seven, right? You probably know him as Tseng... the guy who you- admittedly- watched die. Have you ever heard of a Cure materia, you stupid bitch? Jesus... just go away."  
  
Yuffie blanched, stunned, as Reno advanced to slam the door in her face, not willing to admit it but hurt by his words. Tseng had been beyond the aid of anything, science or magic, no matter how potent or often it was. "I, uh, have some more questions..." she managed to blurt out, debating whether or not to block the door with her foot or go home without any broken toes.  
  
It turned out not to matter though, as the loud ring of a cell phone cut through the silence and Reno stopped in midstep, pulling the phone from inside his jacket and flipping it open, pressed it to his ear. Instantly the Turks eyes widened and he almost dropped the phone. He started to speak back into the receiver but then glared at Yuffie, turned, and sprinted down his hall into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.  
  
Yuffie waited a moment, then took a few steps back into his house, glancing around to get a good look at the way Reno lived. The place seemed a lot bigger from the inside than it did from the street, but that was probably due to the fact the only real furniture in the place was a beaten up couch and a recliner, both of which leather and black. This put her off a little, she'd always imagined him spending all his money on drugs and booze, not saving up to buy actually decent pieces of furniture one by one. She wondered about the gil he'd left at the bar- it'd disappeared seconds after she turned her back, filling some alcoholics bottle right about now, most likely.  
  
The beep of the phone hanging up and the dull thud as Reno dropped it onto the floor told Yuffie that the Turk was about to emerge from his room, but a sudden flurry of activity followed as opposed to him coming back to argue with her some more. She waited, not so patiently -she was picking at a small hole in the leather couch- wondering what the hell was going on until the sound of a zipper being closed rang out, and Reno threw open his door so hard it smashed against the wall; carrying an overstuffed suitcase in one hand and a wad of money so thick he needed to use his thumb and pinkie to hold it. This would have shocked her, but remembering the bar, she realized it was probably all single digit gils. He made a move to walk right past her but she sidestepped, blocking his way, and raised her hands. "Hey!" she squeaked indignantly.  
  
Reno took the time to shoot her an agitated look and seemed to be ready to snap something out, but instead he pushed past her and walked quickly out the door, leaving it open behind him. "I gotta go!" he called over his shoulder, "lock up when your done, and whatever you do, don't look under the mattress." He stopped for a moment, and turned around. "And if you do," he said with a leer, "try to keep an open mind."  
  
Yuffie rolled her eyes and started after him, slamming the door behind her and jogging down the steps that led from the front of his house. After a moments sprint she managed to catch him, and grabbed hold of his arm with both hands so he couldn't walk off again, then stomped her foot in reminiscence of her toddler days. "Where the hell are you going!?" she yelled, "and what in the FUCK is your hurry?"  
  
Reno glanced over, partially angry but also highly amused. "Such language..." he snickered, then looked suddenly thoughtful. For his sake, Yuffie thought, Ill ignore where his eyes just went. But then they returned to her face. "Do you want to find out?"  
  
Yuffie blinked. 


	4. Rebirth, Shut Down

The old white lab with the weather beaten Shinra Inc. logo painted on the side was in ruins, merely a broken and burnt out shell slowly collapsing in Sector 2- the last sector still untouched by Reeves reconstruction plans due to the fact that is was only a part of the city set aside for Shinra research and testing facilities, and it gave the Midgar population great satisfaction to tramp through the wreckage of the old company much like it had once tramped over them. The devastation wrought by Meteor had indeed been halted at the core of the city, but a shock wave rippling with energy had flown on, leveling any and everything in its path. Only people on the very outskirts, those lucky enough to look out even one window and see grass and blue sky instead of cold concrete and billowing pillars of smog, had survived it, and no one had managed to leave the city completely unscathed.  
  
And this lab was no where near the outskirts of the city.  
  
The frame of the building was still in tact- barely- and three of the four walls still stood, but cluttering the inside was a mess so potent, such a complete and chaotic disarray, that it was nearly impossible to imagine the place as the anal retentive's wet dream it had once been. Machines were toppled, their fusings to the floor had been ripped completely up, steel bars jutting out from their metal shells, dripping chemicals and more then a little blood onto the floor where the two pooled and spiraled into a sickening mix of the two. Every beaker, vial, and window had exploded, littering the floor with glass and even more toxins.  
  
Only a couple of mechanisms even remained upright amidst the hurricane hell storm of debris. A massive metal pod was simply an extension of one of the remaining walls, and thus had been impossible to capsize, although it was thoroughly beaten and dented so that it appeared now as a crushed can of beer and not the ovacular egg shape it'd once held. In the center of the room there was a lowered section of the floor that formed a pool sized vat. The pod was still sealed off to the surrounding air, its contents a mystery, but the tub lay wide open for all to see.  
  
The final purpose was to store and contain mako so various objects could be dipped in for a certain amount of time and then retrieved, which was only a half hearted adaptation of a failed attempt to force Huge Materia into existence. It was a purpose that the vat had been fulfilling for many years before the downfall of Midgar... but now, even now, chemicals ran in both turrets and drips from every side, mingling with the life essence of the Planet, as the scientist who had run the lab had called Mako. Oil had sprayed from snapped pipes and malfunctioning machines, not only feeding the then raging fires but also dipping into the vat and turning the volatile mixture a shiny black. Elements of the scientists own creation, foreign metals, specimen atoms, even new types of materia in virgin states of growth peppered the surface of or littered the bottom of the pulsing and churning goo.  
  
The vermin of Midgar has learned long ago to avoid the lab completely, due to the radioactive pulse and strange effects the conception had even at long distances. Any living organism that got within 10 feet would begin to notice significant physical changes, hardened muscles, liquefying fat, accelerated bursts in growth that brought them almost a foot closer to the ceiling. But that was only the original change, the real effect, however, was on the gray matter of the brain. The sheer mass of it doubled, even as their capability to use that brain tripled and then tripled again. The first and last sentient thought the rats and mice and insects had before their brains ruptured and burst through undersized skulls was the knowledge that their brains were about to explode through their undersized skulls.  
  
But there was something else in the vat, besides the blood and the mako and the acids, besides the metal and the oil and the grafted DNA of a thousand different experiments in one spilt drop from a beaker. A body. The body, specifically, of the scientist who had used to run the lab, who had crawled, painstakingly, on his hands and knees as well as his last breath- back to the place he'd spent more time in than his home. He had been barely conscious, let alone coherent, but in his stupor caused by losing a long, drawn out fight, he knew there was a chance. His body was beaten, bloody, and broken, but his soul was as resilient as the day he was born. He knew he needed mako to heal wounds that a Restore materia would be useless on, and damn the side effects. He'd managed to stumble to his feet, and to the vat, and had just straightened up in time for the shock wave to hit him, just in time to die on his feet. It'd bent him backwards, cleanly folding him up but not snapping his transformed spine. Dead instantly, he'd collapsed into the vat, into what then was simply mako.  
  
The scientist, however, was no longer in his original form. The corpse he'd left behind could not have been recognized by his own mother- even if she had seen him grow up instead of leaving him wrapped in a lab coat on the footsteps of Shinra when he was only 5 weeks old, but now he'd been warped further. The mako-mixture, so highly concentrated, both covering and filling him, on him and inside him, churning inside his body like the bright red blood he'd left on the then shiny tiles of the floor. It repaired him and changed him as one and the same, sewing skin back together even as it turned it hard and stiff, regrowing tendons out of steel rather then muscle, setting bones with materia cores. The scientist, was rebuilt, whole, infinitely better than new... in the first few moments after the shock wave.  
  
And then he simply ceased to be. His body melted away, dissolved into the mixture in one flowing movement, cells simply sliding apart and drifting away in the 'mako', mixing and scrambling around, before fusing back together, all at the will of the scientist. He'd advanced beyond what he was, beyond what anyone was, beyond the god themselves. He could change himself, change and move the basic building blocks of life, manipulate his own cells. He ruled his body to the most extreme degree possible.  
  
And the mako didn't even ripple as Hojo, human- or at least appearing so- once more, rose steadily to his feet, and opened his eyes.  
  
*****  
  
"It's too... freakin... c-cold," Rory complained through chattering teeth, pulling her thin jacket even tighter around her even thinner frame as she slowly marched through the filthy Midgar streets and the howling wind ripped against her and flung her coat tails wildly. Normally she could get into this, falling back into her imagination and letting her jacket fly free, and imagine herself as some mighty warrior, with a league of men at her disposal, who never had to answer to anyone, could do whatever they wanted, and never had to have her older brother cut her arm in order to get a roll- a roll for fucks sake- from the local bakery. Normally shed get into this, but beneath her jacket she was only wearing a bra, and the below freezing temperature made the entire image less champion hero and more pedophile fantasy fuel.  
  
Gabriel jerked beside her when she'd started to speak, hand making it halfway to the gun holster he'd strapped around his waist before realizing it wasn't one of the thousands of lowlifes in the slums, but only his companion. She had only said a few words since they'd started out to find her brother, and even then she was just pointing out a turn they had to make or someone with especially wild eyes, at which point Griffon would change his walking to get between the targeted person and her. Looking sheepish, he lowered his hand and spared her a glance, "Its better than usual, actually," he said, gazing over her head and meeting stares with a homeless person , who then settled back under his cardboard box and tucked away the shard of broken glass bottle he'd had gripped in a fist black with dirt. "And did I just hear you admit a sign of weakness? My god... its about time. I was developing a severe inferiority complex over here..."  
  
Rory wrapped her arms tightly around her shoulders and privately vowed to shiver and suffer in silence, it was after all better than giving Gabriel the satisfaction of thinking she was weak and actually needed his weak attempt at protection. She'd lived here her whole life, he was the one who'd just shown up. Slowly, their strides fell into pace with each other, and Rory started to scan street signs, which was Gabriel's first and only sign that they were getting close to the 'house' her and her brother stayed in. He looked forward to meeting Reno, it would be nice to see what kind of person it took to raise a girl like this. Not to mention it was always nice to know the local gang leaders around town in case you ever needed to make a business deal with someone that involved 6 figure sums and flying bullets.  
  
A moment later they came upon a trio of men standing in the middle of the street, huddled around a barrel of trash they'd set alight that cast massive, flickering shadows in all directions. They were setting directly in Rory and Gabriel's path, and even if the broken glass all around didn't prove an adequate weapon, the glimmer of steel against the light was more then obvious; and with a curse under his breath Gabriel prayed that these men were either friendly or immobilized. Neither of the two dared to breathe as they walked so fast they were almost running, but they managed to pass by without incident, even though Gabriel made a point to watch them closely over his shoulder as they walked away, until a rounded corner interfered with their view.  
  
Gabriel leaned over to take one final look around the brick wall, and was so focused on making sure all remained in the light he didn't notice when Rory finally found the street she was looking for and turned into it. He kept walking for about 10 yards until he realized the young redhead was no longer by his side. He rolled his eyes and spun around, almost tripping on the loose gravel that now replaced the paved road, before starting in the direction she'd gone on to in his usual slow, slouching walk.  
  
And then he heard a loud, shrill scream cut through the night, and decided in was time to hurry the fuck up.  
  
He ripped his weapon from its holster and sprinted in the direction the scream had come from, grabbing a street sign as he went and used it to spin as hard as he could around yet another corner, only to feel his feet catch on something and he went sprawling, not even managing to swear as his face raked against the ground and his cheek was shredded in a dozen different places. He rolled over slowly, groaning in pain, to see what he had hit, groping in the darkness to find his dropped gun. Suddenly he felt something strike his arm so hard it almost broke, and looked up to see a dark figure emerge from the shadows, features hidden in the depths of a filthy set of rags the person obviously called clothes. A foot long steel pipe protruded from either end of the mans tightly clenched fist, and was tilted to point directly between Gabriel's eyes.  
  
Instincts and training from over a year ago but that seemed only a day old to Gabriel kicked in, and a clamor of gun shots rang out as in one fluid motion he lashed out with a kick to send the pipe flying away, spun to his feet, snatched up his gun from the ground and leveled it at his assailant. A dark red dotted line laced straight up from the bottom of his targets ribcage until they stopped right below his jawbone, the hail of bullets spraying brain and lifeblood back into the streets and mingling with the trash and filth of those who'd preceded them in the streets. Gabriel had reloaded his gun and holstered it before the body thudded dully against the ground, running again in the direction he'd last heard Rory from. He reached another corner and took it hard, almost tripping again, and drew in a painful breath.  
  
And the wounds on his cheeks stopped bleeding as all the blood rushed from his face and his complexion faded to a sickly pale. A group of men- at least 10- stood in a wide semi circle pressed against a wall, including the three men from the barrel fire who had probably exited the area as soon as Gabriel's gaze had left them, and between them and the wall, was Rory.   
  
The group had her surrounded, and before Gabriel's eyes sent her off her feet with a hard shove from four different directions at once. One quickly reached down, and thwarting Rory's attempt to get to her feet and run, clamped his massive hand over her face with the intention of covering her mouth but more or less containing half her head in his grip. The man visibly twitched a second later as blood began to seep through his clenched fingers and dripped to the street below, and Gabriel was awed at how steady the man stayed while someone literally tried to chew through his hand.   
  
Most of the men held knives or some other makeshift kind of weapon, and all of them appeared to be at least twice Gabriel's age, and almost had that much over him in size ratios. Ignoring both of those facts, Gabriel slowly straightened up and held his gun behind his leg, the least visible but most easily accessible place he could think of. "Hey!" he screamed down the street, using the echoes to mask the evident signs of fear in his voice.  
  
The group of men turned around as one, and the man who held Rory released her and clutched his torn up hand, glaring daggers at his former captive and the blood that was now running down her chin. She slumped to the ground for a moment, then seemed to recover her senses as she crawled backwards away from them on her hands and knees, and when she reached a safe distance, slowly rose to her feet. One of the men, the leader despite his lacking of both size and a visible weapon, spit in the street and took a few steps in Gabriel's direction. "Beat it son," he growled in the typical street persons rasp, and Gabriel could almost smell the cheap whiskey on the man's breath from 20 paces away, "we ain't above putting a lil pretty boy in a wig if ya get me!"  
  
Gabriel couldn't recognize the accent, but figured it was probably Wutain - the only continent on the Planet he hadn't been to in his brief time of training, apparently there was something about traveling that was supposed to toughen you up- but he got him, and he didn't like what he was hearing in the least... and decided to let them know it. Deliberately he pulled his gun out and pointed it between the leader's eyes, pumping back the hammer. "I'm thinking not," he snapped back at him, wrapping his finger around the trigger.  
  
The leader didn't speak for a moment, but Gabriel could tell the rusty and caustic gears inside his head were turning, and with a simple beckon he signaled for two men to seize Rory again and force a blade up to her throat. She growled at them and kicked out, twisting around, even as Gabriel heard the voice of Vincent Valentine play in his head, a message from day one of his training. "Always call their bluff." Simple as that.  
  
He remembered asking his teacher if someone's life was enough to amend that rule, and could still picture the blank stare Vincent had fixed him with as his only answer, and mirrored that stare towards the gang leader. "Go on," he said as quietly as he could for the leader to still hear him, praying Rory didn't, "kill her. Then we get to see how fast you can run."  
  
In response the man reached into his jacket, and Griffin tightened his grip on the stock of his pistol, but all that was pulled out was a small green ball that seemed to shine with its own light, flickering in a strange green glow. Gabriel peered closer, uncertain. "What the hell is that?" he murmured.  
  
The other man smiled, but didn't answer at first. Instead he held the orb out in front of him like he himself did not recognize it, and then his grip tightened. "Comet," he said simply.  
  
Any further questions Gabriel might have had was cut of as something unbelievably heavy struck him in the back, and for the briefest second the world came into total focus- and then everything went black. 


	5. Premonitions of Pain

With an exhausted groan, Rufus heaved his shotgun high above his head and, mustering what he would have swore was the last of his strength, brought it down to smash against the towering plant that loomed in his way, crushing the stem- though he would have called it a trunk- and sending all six feet of it crashing to the soil. He paused to stare, with entirely blank eyes, at the fruits of his labor and took the time to try to wipe his forehead with his already sweat drenched sleeve. Beside him Zack simply stabbed out with his sword, clearing a space twice as large as Rufus' without exercising half of the effort. The young president shot Zack a look of complete and total annoyance, but couldn't sink to the level of asking him to take over clearing the way; the same way he simply couldn't ask Zack what the hell the tune he'd been whistling non-stop was called. "So... Soldier.." he rasped out instead, voice catching and ripping in his bone dry throat, for Rufus had given up entirely on hiding his fatigue, "do you... see anything... you recognize?"  
  
Zack was smart enough to hide the grin that fought to rise due to the slow, out of breath mumbling that was now Rufus' only way of communication. It gave the Soldier a great deal of personal satisfaction to see that the leader of Shinra, although by no means fat, was horribly out of shape for any type of manual labor. In fact, Zack was actually forcing himself to move at a slower pace as to not leave his blonde companion behind. "Not really," he said, "but I know this sure as hell is not Gongana. Soldier simply pointed us and said go, they hardly ever even told us where we were being sent."  
  
Rufus smirked. He'd managed to- although only to a small degree- knock the Soldier down a bit, or at least kept him from climbing even further up of the self-worth scale with his greater physicality and more suiting for the situation weapon. Peasants, his father had once told him, were simple enough to handle. You simply remind them that is exactly what they are, peasants. It was amazing how his dad had been so incredibly business wise but was stupid in absolutely every other aspect of the world. He hastily dropped the smirk from his face when he turned to look up, blinking into the harsh light coming down from above. "Yeah, just like a gun. You sure as hell make some good ammo though. Let's get going." Rufus made a step to continue on, but stopped as Zack quickly grabbed him by the elbow and held him still. The raven haired Gonganan had his head tilted to one side and was listening to something very intently. Rufus slowly looked around, saw nothing, then shot Zack a worried glance. "Uh..."  
  
"Ssh!" Zack cut him off, letting go of Rufus' arm and gripped the handle of his Buster sword with both hands. "I think we may have company."  
  
Mirroring Zack in his sudden alert caution, Rufus raised his shotgun, but hadn't even got it all the way up when he felt something heavy and about the size of a globe slam into his back, sending both him and his weapon into the dirt. There was a loud ripping sound as his shirt was shredded open, and Rufus groaned as he felt 20 thick claws sink into his back and grind him into the ground, forcing the air from his lungs.  
  
Zack stared for a moment, trying to identify the mess of dark, wet fur that was attacking his companion. It was about 2 feet long, and was just about as wide... in fact, it was pretty much that high as well. It resembled a hairy, spiky basketball, if you could ignore the two gleaming red eyes that peered out from under a tangle wire of fur. Zack leapt forward, and with one quick thrust, buried his sword deep... into a redwood tree. Stunned, Zack darted his gaze around to find the hair ball crouched all the way across the clearing, growling and hissing at him like some kind of bloated cat. Sparing Rufus a quick glance as the president rolled over towards his gun, Zack once again raised his sword and glared at the creature. "So," he growled, preparing to charge it. "your fast, huh? Lets see if you can out run this you ugly mother fu-"  
  
The Soldiers barked out insult was turned into a breathless choke as he felt three heavy blows hit him from all sides, one into his stomach, another on his chest, and the third caved his legs in by hitting him in the back of the legs. Dust flew when he thudded against the ground, and he was swarmed be all 4 of the creatures, and his vision went red with blood as a paw swipe ripped his forehead open.  
  
Now it was Rufus' turn to watch the other get assailed, and without hesitation he snatched up his gun and took careful aim, finally finding a shot he could fire that wouldn't kill Zack as well as his attacker. Straight in the air. The blast from the gun shredded the leaves above, which then showered down over him like tear drops of chlorophyll, but he'd managed to distract the things; even if it was only for a moment. Rufus sprinted forward and swung his gun like a baseball bat, catching one of them directly on its underneath and sending it flying into a tree. There was an audible snapping sound, but Rufus didn't hear it as he smashed the butt of his shotgun down right between the eyes of a second rat. Zack took advantage of the newly gotten maneuverability and backhanded the creature on his stomach so hard it cartwheel backwards, stunned, before rolling over and charging into the woods. The remaining thing tried to run but Zack spun his sword in his grip and stabbed down, piercing straight through its lower back and pinning it to the ground, prompting it to unleash a frantic, high pitched squeal, which suddenly cut off and was replaced by dead silence- an entirely unnerving turn of events, as it was obvious by the creatures squirms that it was still very much alive..  
  
With a loud groan, Zack pulled himself up and looked around to make sure nothing else was coming, then turned back to Rufus, only to get a sudden mist of blood in his face as the Shinra forced the barrel of his gun into the pinned rat's stomach and fired. The Gonganan wiped his eyes and flicked the liquid away, shooting Rufus a dozen glares at once. "What," he asked, "the hell, was that for?"  
  
Rufus pointed at the remaining half of the creature with the tip of his gun, wrinkling his nose in disgust. "It was ripping itself loose," he winced, looking like he was about to be sick. Zack peered closer and realized that Rufus was right, the thing had actually been ready to rip the sword through its own lower abdomen to get away. How human like, he thought briefly, to kill yourself just to spite the men trying to kill you.  
  
"Jesus," Zack muttered, surprised by the sudden bout of queasiness he felt, "what are these things?"  
  
In answer Rufus flipped over the limp body of one of the still intact animals. "They look like rats," he ventured slowly, "really big rats. But they don't have tails."  
  
Zack glanced up at him. "These aren't normal rats, are they?"  
  
Rufus frowned, something flickering across his face that was very nearly guilt, but not quite. "They must be... uh..."  
  
"Mako rats," Zack finished for him, and Rufus looked away.  
  
********  
  
It was inside a small cottage in the woods just east of Midgar that a world with no Cetra become a world with two. The day was in that suspended pause between day and night where the sun was just a glimmering slit on the horizon, and even through the thick foliage that hung above you could see the sky in all of its reddish hue. The cottage itself, however, was pocketed in a completely camouflaged corner of the forest, and had almost no view of the sun, the sky, or even the horizon, and those things had no view of it- which was, of course, the point.  
  
The cottage was simple enough. A square, wooden box, with a deceptively large number of doors and an unsettlingly small amount of doors, and with two beds lying side by side. The two individuals who lay in those beds, however, were an entirely different matter. There were no two on the Planet who's story, when told in full, could be less simple than theirs.  
  
The first was of a gentle build, shallow curves that were barely visible beneath the pink dress she had sewn herself, features as delicate as the flower she wore at her neck as a brooch and had pawned off on the streets of Midgar, not in an effort for gil but instead to spread some color to the bleak place. Her head was haloed in flowing auburn hair that fell around her shoulders, and if her eyes had been open, it would have exaggerated the sparkling emerald green glow inside them.  
  
The other could have been easily mistaken for a god. He towered above almost every other man on the Planet at an even 7 feet, with wide set shoulders that would have appeared massive even without the white and golden armored shoulder pads he has strapped around them. His actual body was slim- not that anyone would be able to tell due to the full body cloak he wore- but still contained an unbelievable amount of muscle and power. His eyes- also closed- truthfully mirrored the shade of the lady who lay in the bed beside him, but appeared almost gray due to the long, silver hair that fell back between his shoulder blades.  
  
Time passed without effect, without meaning, with neither of them as much as drawing in a breath or batting an eyelash. The sun crept down behind the mountains, casting black shadows throughout the forest and covering the cabin in darkness, only to rise again in the morning, peaking over the rolling hills of Kalm. Beams of light darted through the forest and between the trees, but only when the first ray of sun snaked through the cottages only window and entered the room in which the two currently resided did the pair move, each suddenly gasping air into lungs that hadn't functioned in months.  
  
Aeris Gainsborough rose first, sitting straight up and opening her eyes. She peered loftily around the room for a moment, before sliding out of bed and pushing straight her all too cheerful pink dress, then paused, staring down at her hands as if she'd never seen them before. She wiggled her fingers almost playfully, and a bright grin split across her face. Almost skipping, she turned around to face her still immobile companion. "Oh I know you're awake Sephiroth," she said, growing a little more serious, "so quit pretending. We have a lot of preparation to get through."  
  
The giant of a man in the bed exhaled deeply, apparently resigning to a conversation with Aeris that he obviously felt would be as annoying as it would be pointless. "Quiet women!" he snapped, still moving nothing but his mouth, "I'm trying to remember the exact moment my life became a living hell."  
  
Aeris was in no mood to repeat an argument she'd made over a dozen times before, so she simply t'sked and reached under her bed, pulling out a staff that would normal be considered a simple walking stick if not for a very intricate protrusion at the top. "Probably," she quipped, "when you decided to burn Nibelheim to the ground."  
  
At this Sephiroth opened his eyes, even if it was just to shoot Aeris a look of both hatred and disbelief. His gaze no longer shone with that maniacal glaze, but still glew brightly with an intensity that only the eagles had mastered. "Normally," he began, voice hinting with a jagged edge of amusement, "I would allow you the point here just so I could get your voice out of my mind all the faster, but I still maintain that what the truth of my heritage did to my mind should get me off on at least a few of the actions that sprouted from that point. Insanity doesn't couple seamlessly with accountability. In fact, they're not even close."  
  
The flower girl sighed, brushing her hair to the side and turning away, not wanting to dispute the argument that the Planet itself has apparently accepted- for if it hadn't, Sephiroth wouldn't be lying there. She brushed around the room for a few minutes, trying to appear busy, but soon lost her patience. She needed Sephiroth's help with what they were going to have to do, she couldn't carry two unconscious men herself. "All right!" she said reluctantly, "now what are you doing??"  
  
As if realizing his unwanted companion was not planning to shut up anytime in the near future, Sephiroth finally got to his feet, brushed even the unusually raised ceiling with the high portions of his hair as he did so. He glanced down as the bed as if expecting something to happen, and when it didn't, knelt down and pulled out his Masanume. "I was imagining that this was all a dream. A bad dream. Especially you."  
  
Aeris couldn't believe the Soldiers gall. "You were given a second chance that most people can only dream of and beg for! Not just the chance to save your name here on earth, but your soul for the rest of eternity! I hope you understand if you end up getting no empathy from me."  
  
Sephiroth glanced down the edge of his sword and tilted his head, scanning the blade and smiling a grim smile of razor sharp teeth in approval. There wasn't a dent or a nick in it, which wasn't bad for over a year of not being treated. "No, Ancient, imagining that what happened before I died was a dream," Sephiroth mumbled, slicing the air effortlessly with a few practice swings, "that the ignorant fool had stayed home with his bar maid whore, instead of meddling in my business and forcing me to end up aiding... you... in saving this worthless hunk of rock."  
  
Aeris only shrugged, glad that she'd gotten him moving at least. "Well," she offered, "you could always go back to burning in the Lifestream until the end of time. You had the option to stay then and you have the option to go back now."  
  
Sephiroth sheathed his sword and tucked it inside his trench coat, where for some inexplicable reason it disappeared from sight. "You really do miss the point," he said, no longer seeming like he was even talking to her. "If this world has to go on existing I would much prefer it remembered me and trembled at that memory than a world ruled by my so called father."  
  
Aeris smiled, a much nicer smile than Sephiroth could ever manage to produce. Even a normal person could detect the hidden meanings behind those few words, and she had much more awareness of what happened in the world around her than any normal person. But beyond that, something better. Sephiroth was finally ready to get to work. It had taken 12 months of burning, but he was ready. Not a moment too soon, either, the Planet had been growing as anxious as she lately. "I guess," she said, "you can stay in here while the others come around."  
  
Sephiroth was silent, but he turned around to face her, face mingled with confusion. You could tell his mind was working hard, looking for some check or balance he'd missed to cause that statement so he wouldn't need to ask. Aeris, not wanting to waste anymore time, answering his unasked question before he ended up hurting something. "You aren't planning to reveal yourself to them, are you?"  
  
The towering Solider snorted and turned away, realizing he'd been thrown off guard by yet another stupid weakling frailty. It never ceased to amaze him that a girl from an entire line of Cetra, an entire race awarded the title of the Planet's helpers, could be so amazingly human. He couldn't care less if Strife of Rufus never wanted to see him again, he never felt like seeing them again either. "They'll get over it," he sneered, staring out the cottage window as a hawk dive-bombed from above, crushing the life from some unseen creature with steely yellow talons.  
  
It was Aeris' turn to be thrown off a little. "Get over what?" she asked, "they'll kill you!"  
  
Sephiroth tensed up, involuntarily grabbing the hilt of his sword and squeezing hard, causing the biceps on his arm ripple like a nest full of pythons. Talons. "Cloud Strife," Sephiroth said in a dangerously low voice. Strife. The Mouse. "Strife was never worthy to hold my materia. I," Hawk, "could crush his skull in my fist if I didn't think his hair would stab through my hand."  
  
Aeris almost gave up and let the point go, starting out the door, but realized losing a few more minutes of time was an easy price to pay if she didn't have to listen to this kind of talk for the weeks to come. "Cloud killed you. Just Cloud. All alone, in that cavern in the Northern Crater. This time you'd have not only him, but all of his friends, all of Shinra, and all of the Turks going for your blood." And then she continued out of the room, leaving him no time to reply.  
  
Sephiroth stared blankly after her, anger smoldering in his eyes. The words of a foolish optimist rang in his ears, because that's what Aeris simply was. She assumed that everything would go by plan, that those three groups of men would even get into the house without several homicides taking place on the door step. Stupid. They would all die, they would all fail, and then at the very least he could get back to resting, fires or no. 


	6. On The Move Already, Movement Halted

Reno started to run as fast as he could the second the let him off the plane. A quick shortcut of jumping on and riding a conveyer belt gained him his -and someone else's- suitcase, and a way past security checks that saved him at least 30 minutes if they sucked at their jobs, and several hours if they found the gun he'd stuffed in the lining of the bag. He followed that with a breathless sprint to the stairs leading towards the airports exit and slide all the way down the railing, not missing a step as he landed perfectly on his feet and slammed through the doors. Only after three more blocks of jogging did he stop, gasping for air and rubbing his cramped sides as he leaned back against a brick wall. "Christ," he moaned, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one with a match that he then tossed away into the street, and took a long drag on the cancer stick, "I have got to give up smoking."  
  
He started suddenly, remembering, and glanced quickly down the street in either direction, grabbing both his old and newly acquired bags in case he had to start running again. There was no one there. "Oh thank you lord," he sighed, tossing away his still almost entirely whole cigarette. He'd managed to lose her. After three hours of senseless babble and inane questions, he'd gotten away from that doting bimbo Yuffie. It would never stop amazing him how someone who could be that good in a fight would decide boredom was an adequate excuse to tell someone your life story, even if they were interested in hearing it, which he sure as hell hadn't been. What the fuck had he been thinking, asking her along?  
  
The ex-Turk rose to his feet and hefted his bags, beginning at a much more normal pace down the streets. The bar was only two more blocks into the city, and Reno stopped as he recognized the name Tseng had told him on the store sign, despite the letters that had been faded almost entirely away. "The Sh00ting Star", with the two o's changed to 0's... Reno couldn't hardly believe his eyes. Double zeroes was the universal street code for a place you can score anything from pot to assault rifles to hookers, though not necessarily all at once. It was a fact the police pretended to be ignorant of to save themselves the trouble. So Elena was dealing now... innocent, and straight up, never-did-drugs-in-her-life Elena was a dealer. And Reno was a card shark now, even though Elena could always beat him in 3 out of 4 hands of poker. Or rum. Or anything. The world was full of ironies, and every one of them was annoying. Reno pushed the swinging doors of the bar open and entered, reaching into his bag and pulling out a small glass vial.  
  
The 'bar' has about 8 people in it, but all of them were gathered around one table, laughing in a way only little green leaves could grant. Reno almost groaned at such a blatant opportunity to grab some quick gil gone to waste, but he didn't have the time to look into it. Maybe later, he wished silently, before taking a seat at the bar. Right now he had to talk to the bar maid, and he had to be nice- Tseng has said she was a bit of a bitch, though her more then evident curves presented a convincing enough argument against that fact to Reno. He signaled her with a tap of his knuckles on the wooden bar, and shot her a dazzling grin. "Hi ya Royce," he said, "I'm going to need some Vodka, or if you don't have that anything over 100 proof will do, all right babe? Basically if you can light it on fire, then I'll be happy. Oh, and pour some of this in it." He handed her the vial, which she stared at appraisingly for a few moments, before shrugging and walking off to make his drink. It was, after all, his liver. Reno watched her walk away for a few moments, before spinning his bar stool around to face the entrance.  
  
"I guess," said the girl standing there, "it's too much to hope for to ask if that was water or not, right?"  
  
Reno slumped down into his stool and groaned. He'd apparently underestimated Yuffie's ninja ability to track him 6 blocks into a busy city. Or he'd told her the name of the bar in some vague self defense method against her unstoppable babble, and forgotten. Whichever. He decided to simply ignore her and hope she'd go away, and turned around to grab his drink as Royce slid it to him. The ignore and drink technique had worked for him with most of the other girls that haunted his life.  
  
Yuffie, of course, had to destroy his hopes of blocking her out by sitting right next to him, though he was glad she didn't mention his all too obvious attempt to have her stranded at the air port- that one would be hard for even him to explain. He watched in amusement as she actually waited for the waitress to wander over to her, and then ordered what was quite possibly the dumbest thing Reno had ever heard. "I'll take a virgin Shirley Temple, with no cherry."  
  
Reno's drink could get a 400 pound man drunk just by sipping it over a two hour period of time, so he downed the entire thing in one gulp and slammed the glass down on the counter so hard it almost shattered. There was no particular reason for him to do it, just an old force of habit he'd developed when trying to catch the eye of whatever low cut shirt wearing girl who happened to be around. He tried giving Yuffie a look to see if she realized how stupid she truly was, but she only stared back at him in confusion. "What?" she asked after a moment, glancing into a nearby glass to see if something was on her face.  
  
He paused, wondering if it was truly worth the probable argument to tell her, and then made his usual decision when faced with that quandary- why yes, yes it was. "A virgin Shirley Temple with no cherry?" he said, idly spinning his glass around in the bar. "So what happened? Unfortunate incident with a fence post, perhaps forgot she'd placed a candle on her chair?"  
  
Yuffie stared at him blankly. "...what?"  
  
Reno sighed. "Never mind," he said, "finish your drink. I've got to go talk to some people for a little." Reno moved one seat over away from Yuffie and signaled Royce again, leering forward over the bar. "Hey babe, you wouldn't happen to know where I can find a tall, pale guy with a dot right between his eyes now would you?"  
  
Royce took a step back and glared at him. Another one in the same day, that was just great. At least this one didn't start out with his gun drawn, though she had no doubt one would appear quickly enough if she tried to fake ignorance. Elena didn't pay her enough for this kind of thing, and if she wanted absolute privacy she could include an Uzi in this year's Christmas bonus. She jerked her thumb towards the doorway behind her and Reno answered with a nod, quickly avoiding Yuffies glare as he went to walk through the opening in the counter.  
  
"Hey!" she said indignantly, when it became obvious he had no intention of bringing her along. "I thought I was going to find out what was going on. How the hell am I supposed to do that from here?"  
  
"Well..." Reno pondered on it, "you could listen really closely."  
  
"Hah." Yuffie said, paused, and then repeated herself. "Hah. I'm serious. I didn't come all the way over here just to find out that you don't like to drink alone."  
  
"Yeah, yeah," Reno muttered, wondering to himself what the hell he'd been thinking when he'd asked her to go along. He didn't even like brunettes, and she was probably jail bait anyway... he had an index card somewhere in his suitcase that listed the Kalm laws for that sort of thing, but all he could remember off hand was they were a lot stricter than they were in Wutai. After all, that was half of the reason he had moved to the isolated island continent. "Believe me, you'll learn what you came for, but I need to go check it out first."  
  
Her tone was stubborn. "And why is that?" she asked, glaring over the rim of her glass as she took another sip.  
  
"Because," he growled, "I'm not really sure if this is going to be a St. Valentine's day reenactment, OK? It's not like people are above machine gunning a former Turk down just for the reputation."  
  
For once, Yuffie didn't have anything particularly annoying to say. "Oh," she uttered softly, then took another sip, finishing her drink. She looked disappointed as she stared into the empty glass, and made a mental note to get the bar tender in Green Dragon to learn how to make them. "Well hurry up."  
  
"You got it, brat," with that parting shot, Reno side stepped between the gap in the bar and walked quickly towards the back rooms of the bar. He came across a door marked 'Private', and following his training to the letter, promptly pushed it open.  
  
The first thing he saw was Elena, leaning back against the wall, and almost thought the old cliché, 'she hasn't changed a bit.' And then he caught her eyes, and realized that couldn't be further from the truth. They weren't ice, didn't have the edge of a true killer, but they were a lot colder than they'd used to be, a sort of velvet coated steel. It was the look she should have had a year ago when the Turks were still around, but hadn't.  
  
And next to her... was Tseng. Reno blinked, stunned, having never truly believed it even when he'd heard his mentor's voice over the phone, which was why he had packed more weapons than clothes in his bag. His eyes instinctively went to Tseng's chest, and he could see a thin white line tracing up his neck and disappearing beneath his collar. So that was where... Reno gulped as he walked up to Tseng, looking him up and down. And then he grinned. "Tseng," he started, "what the fuck is this shit?"  
  
Tseng smiled back at him and held out his hand. "It's good to see you, man." Reno grabbed his hand and pulled Tseng into a tight embrace, which his friend returned in full. Reno quickly released him and gave Elena the same hug, marveling at the thickened muscles he felt wrapped around his waist.  
  
Reno paused for a moment, a sudden, lingering doubt on his mind. He tensed up, and then turned suddenly on his heel, catching the third man in the room in a quick clap on the shoulder, which Rude returned. His best friend hadn't made a sound, but Reno had learned long ago how to detect him despite the absence of noise. "Hey, man. I hear your workin' as a bouncer at some night club now," he said, "think you can get me in sometime?"   
  
Rude shot him a small smile, and shook his head. "Hey, I'm a door watcher, not a miracle worker. There is a dress code I'm supposed to enforce, you know."  
  
"Cute," Reno growled, but inwardly meant it. It had been too damn long since he'd heard the ever professional Rude take a shot at his sloppiness, and it was definitely a criticism that he didn't mind.  
  
"So," he said, addressing all three of the others. "Like I said. What the hells going on? I mean, no offense Tseng, but shouldn't you be being eaten by several varieties of earth worm at this point?"  
  
"Nah, I keep that from happening by actually washing my suit sometimes," Tseng said, eyeballing skeptically the ragged condition of Reno's clothes. "Maybe you should look into it."  
  
Reno paused. "So I take it you have no fucking clue?"  
  
Tseng laughed. "And you say you wouldn't make a good intelligence officer."  
  
"Does it really matter?" Elena interrupted any response that Reno might have concocted. "Results matter, reasons don't. Things are back like they should be."  
  
"No, they aren't," Tseng corrected her, sounding troubled. Elena looked at him in confusion. "Things are as you'd like them to be, it doesn't mean its right. Hey, I'm as happy as any of you that I'm here right now, but I'm not going to start enjoying it until I find out how, and why it happened."  
  
"That's stupid!" Elena suddenly burst out, drawing a shocked look from the three males in the room. "There's nothing you could learn that would make things any better than-"  
  
"Miss Elena?" Royce said, probably not for the first time. Elena's voice had risen dramatically as she spoke, capable of blocking out the steady whisper in which her waitress spoke.   
  
"Yes, Royce?" Elena snapped, her voice dropping in volume but the frustration still very much evident.  
  
"You have a phone call. The lady says its urgent." Royce answered.  
  
"Oh does she?" Elena said with sarcastic concern. "Well did she say what the hell the big deal was about?"  
  
"Um, no Miss..." Royce admitted, "she wouldn't tell me."  
  
"Then hang up on her," Elena said irritably, dismissing Royce with a wave of her hand. The bar maid hesitated for a moment, as if she had something else on her mind, but then went to deal with the phone call. Elena took a moment to regroup, coming the hair that had fallen over her eyes back, and sighed.  
  
"Like I was saying," she continued, noticeably more subdued, "there is no reason to go dragging up answers to a question that doesn't matter."  
  
Almost the second she finished her final word, a high pitched, buzzing ring rang out, yet another interruption. She looked around in irritation, her gaze falling on the source of the noise- one of Reno's bags. She glanced up at the red haired Turk, her look expectant. "Well?" she asked, "aren't you going to answer it?"  
  
"Nah," he answered with a shrug, "I knicked that bag. The guy's probably calling to see if I'm dumb enough to answer."  
  
They all paused for a few moments, waiting for the ringing to cease. It went on for three more rings, and then three after that, and it was showing no signs of stopping. They gave it a good thirty seconds, before exhaling harshly, Tseng gestured sharply at the bag. "Well shut it up at least!" he growled.  
  
Reno shrugged, lifted his foot, and brought it down hard on the suitcase. The ring took a momentary rattle, and then returned, prompting Reno to stomp at it yet again. This time, a very satisfying crunch sounded, and the ringing ceased altogether. The group collectively paused, as if waiting for something, and when that something failed to occur, Elena tried one last time.  
  
"It's-"  
  
The ring came this time from Reno's second suitcase, the one he had actually packed from home, and he had to move fast to snatch the bag up from the ground before Elena's foot came slamming down. "Hey!" he said defensively, clutching the bag, "I have vodka in here!"  
  
"Answer your fucking phone!" Elena yelled at him, apparently taken beyond her snapping point.  
  
"OK, OK!" Reno said defensively, fishing around in the bag for his cell phone. "Christ, I don't know how I've survived the last twelve months without all this fucking verbal abuse..." hastily he flipped the phone opened and pressed receive, lifting it expectantly to his ear. "Yeah, what do you-"  
  
He paused, blinking very suddenly, and pressed the phone tighter to his ear. Several times he opened his mouth to speak, but it seemed that whoever was on the other end of the transmission wasn't ceasing their speech any, as he simply didn't get the opportunity to respond. When he finally did get to utter what could be considered as a sound, it was followed by him angrily slamming the phone down- whoever it was had hung up.  
  
"Well?" Tseng asked expectantly.  
  
"I'm not entirely sure...." Reno said, then paused. "What the hell that was."  
  
"OK..." Tseng said tolerantly, "how about you start by telling us who it was?"  
  
"Uh..." Reno blinked. "Aeris?"  
  
********  
  
Rufus growled and spit obscenities as his tattered shirt got tangled up in yet another thorn bush. It only took one vain pull that ended up catching it even more to convince Rufus that it simply wasn't worth it, and Rufus tore the bloody rage from his body and tossed the remainders of it into the bush, leaving only with an even bloodier and raggier undershirt on. "If you want it you damned plant," he muttered, spitting a bright stream of fluorescent red after his shirt, "you can have it."  
  
He stumbled forward, his foot smacking into an upraised tree root which nearly sent him dive bombing into the dirt, where he was fairly certain he'd have simply closed his eyes and stayed. The Shinra executive hissed out every profanity he had ever head- and Heidigger had said quite a lot- and then made some more up on the spot. Zack has long since disappeared from view into the distance, but Rufus found both to his relief and immense disgust that he could track the Gonganan by following his blood trail easily, like hunters did with wounded deer.  
  
The Midgar native halted in his tracks in front of an unusually large pool of Zack's lifeblood and stared at it in confusion, head swimming. It just didn't make any sense... he knew that both of them had some blood inducing wounds, but none of them had been extremely deep, and after almost two hours -it felt like an eternity to Rufus- of walking under a blazing sun all of them should have clotted up and sealed over by now. It never really hit you how much an open cut could bleed it was never scabbed over, but the young president was witnessing it first hand. He guessed that the rampant humidity could be responsible, somehow, or if mako had indeed been involved with the rats mutation it could have been the stupid furry things themselves who had caused it. Chemicals on the nails or something... all things considered, it was a hell of a way to track your pray.  
  
Oh shit!  
  
Rufus spun around, eyes dancing frantically through the forest around him, but he didn't see any swarm of rats crouching there, ready to pounce forward and rip him to pieces. But even as he looked his vision blurred, blinked out, then returned, and he realized how fuzzy everything was looking around the edges. Nervous at what he may not be seeing that he should be, Rufus pushed himself forward again, ignoring the aching thirst that clutched at his throat and choked him, almost down to his knees. He thought he could make out his Soldier companion's frame in the distance, which surprised him considering Zack should have been over 4 miles ahead considering the two differing paces and the number of times he had stopped to rest, his little stops for breathing coming closer and closer together over the last few miles.  
  
The president limped forward at a slug's pace, approaching his companion and friend of sorts- at least partner in arms, at the moment, who was simply standing there with a disoriented look on his face, zoning out as he stared up into the sun. Rufus opened his mouth to call out, but suddenly felt bile rush up his throat, choking him. He managed to swallow, but couldn't seem to find the breath he had lost, and after a few moments of futilely trying to inhale, his knees gave way and he collapsed on the spot.  
  
Zack heard him landing only as a dull thud, barely audible over the throbbing ring in his ears, and he turned, eyes half lidded and lifeless. He took a step towards the collapsed form of Rufus and felt his own feet catch up with each other, and a moment later he landed face first in the dirt.  
  
'Huh...' his mind idled, 'this isn't so bad. In fact, it's kind of comfortable...' and then, blackness.  
  
It wasn't large until a large, lumbering shape approached the two of them, pushing itself effortlessly between the leaves and the plant life of the forest, watching their fallen forms skeptically. But the warrior and the president knew none of this, lying in darkness on the hard soil of the Midgar forest, too exhausted to bleed. 


	7. Converging Paths

Gabriel's eyes fluttered open slowly, trying to adjust to the horrible lighting, and the first thing he realized was that his left arm was hanging painfully by his side, bent at an angle he never even knew was possible. He cautiously attempted to lift and was rewarded only with a blast of mind altering pain. Broken. Great. The last time he'd woken up in bad lighting with a broken arm he'd been surrounded by at least three dead prostitutes...  
  
The second thing he realized was that his good arm was bound to a stone wall by a length of chain that was obviously meant to be there, as it disappeared seamlessly into the wall, and he sighed heavily. This had 'long day' written all over it, and he'd only been awake for a little over ten seconds.  
  
He could barely see Rory who was only a few feet to his left, so dense was the darkness, but he could tell that she was beginning to wake up. This was getting reminiscent of their first meeting in the alley, except this time, thankfully, they were both fully clothed. Gabriel had no idea *why* that was so, remembering the words of the gang leader from earlier, but he was sure as hell glad of the fact. On the down side, they were still chained up pretty securely in what looked like some freak's pleasure dungeon, decorated with the less then tasteful decor of branding irons and a strap down table. In a normal situation, Griffon muttered mentally, he'd have been able to snap the aged and rusted chains, but he'd have needed full use of both of his arms to do so.  
  
He did have one option left open to him, but he decided to wait and watch to see how things panned out before excersizing it. The same as he did every other time he was faced with this particular option. Which made it less of an option, really, and more of a back up, a last resort, an ever present and truly unappealing 'Plan B'.   
  
Rory mumbled incoherently as she returned fully to consciousness, but she went deadly silent for a moment as she took in their surroundings, and Gabriel could tell by the ever increasing speed of her breath that the decorative apparel didn't appeal to her either. "Gabriel..." she asked, and he could hear a kind of controlled fear in her voice, "where the hell are we?"  
  
After another futile look around and a search through his memories, a trip that was side tracked only by the dull recognition that she'd asked for him upon waking up and not her older brother- at least she didn't have some weird obsession with the guy- Gabriel could only shrug. "I'm not sure," he tried to say, but it came out as a dry croak, and he wondered how long he'd been laid out down there," fucked up dungeons of the world weren't really a course in my training. How to build them, sure, but how to recognize them..."  
  
Rory was about to ask exactly what kind of training he was talking about when footsteps rang out from high on the stone stairway that lay across the room from them, a stairway they could only guess at the dimensions of due to the darkness. The leader of the gang, the one who had the materia earlier, strutted down the steps and made his way and over to them with a twisted leer plastered on his face, and the two could only look away in disgust as his eyes roamed over every inch of them both. Finally, he turned to Rory, and with a look of definite decision on his face he crooned, "Come on girly. Get on your feet."  
  
Her only response was a piercing glare that reminded Gabriel heavily of ice shards, and if anything she lowered herself down closer to the floor. Annoyance instantly filled their captor's face and he seized her by the shoulders, yanking her off her feet and into the air so far her chains stretched taut and slammed her hard back against the stone wall. She lashed out against him with a flurry of weakened punches and kicks but the man easily caught both of her wrists in one hand and undid her shackles with a key he held in the other, before slinging her writhing form over his shoulder like a sack of grain.  
  
Before leaving, the man turned to look at Gabriel, preparing a lewd remark that would keep him scared and nervous until his turn came up. He was met with a kick to the face so hard it damn near knocked him out, and for a second Rory fell from his grip. He grabbed at her again, once again fighting off her spurt of offense, as Gabriel climbed to his feet, having hurled himself against the chains to deliver the kick and paid with two shoulder joints screaming in pain, one from being broken and the other from being hyper extended. Too bad he hadn't had enough room to follow through with the rest of the move, it had this neat little tail end that actually involved striking a part of the body with the base of your palm that most people forgot they had.  
  
Their kidnapper's eyes blazed with unconcealed rage as he clutched the side of his face and growled an unintelligible threat, then charged up and kicked Gabriel in the ribs twice as hard as he'd been kicked himself, bouncing the boy against the stone wall with each kick. The youth went down hard, and made the mistake of putting out his hands to stop the fall, only to feel two sides of his broken bone scrape against each other. The agony was so intense that Gabriel could only gasp as his vision dimmed and he almost blacked out, and then he collapsed to the cement floor below and wrapped the majority of the rest of his body around his damaged limb the best he could. His assailant laughed in a sickened glee as he watched the results of his blows, turned, and then casually walked back up the stone stairs, a struggling Rory in tow.  
  
Once the pain had faded enough for Gabriel to roll over on his back and wipe his eyes, he raised a hateful glare to the spot the two had disappeared from. It seemed as if his mind had been made up for him, and he'd have to go through with his ever present plan B. That decision did little to relieve his apprehension or his pain, but it was his to make and he'd made it.  
  
Any random onlooker who might have been hidden back in the depths of the room- not entirely a rare occurrence in a place such as this- would have seen nothing for a moment as the young man simply lay on the ground clutching his wounded limb, breathing heavily. After that moment, however, he would see something very specific-  
  
-and then he would begin to run.  
  
*****  
  
The lowering helicopter swarmed up the dust below, kicking and blowing it all over the small cottage it was settling down next to. The silent figure awaiting out side should have been enveloped in flying debris as well, but mysteriously evaded the swirling wall of dirt and rocks. Reno kicked open the door to the helicopter even while the craft was still in the air, and leapt from the new opening to land heavily beside Aeris. He hit the ground too hard and his knees buckled, causing his legs to kick out and send him momentarily reeling, but he instantly stumbled to his feet again. The look in his eyes amazed Aeris.... it was like everything they had been a year ago- cold, sharp, intense- had simply faded away over the past twelve months, and were just now struggling to return.  
  
The Ancient began to answer him but then stopped suddenly, closing her mouth and fixing Reno with a studying gaze. He seemed, besides his eyes, to not have changed at all over the past 12 months, he was still just a figure chiseled out of bitter and hating marble. It startled her how Tseng's return hadn't seemed to soften the inner anger inside him at all, no matter what his outward facade might say.  
  
He cocked an eyebrow at her, but seemed to be in no hurry to speak as he simply stood for a bit, looking around, proving to her that his logic defying leap from the helicopter had simply been for show. So typical, she thought, and its that kind of thing that will kill him some day, if the cigarette's don't first. "Well?" he yelled, after a time, screaming only to keep his voice above the level of the helicopter's rotary blades. "You have something to tell me that can't be done over the phone?"  
  
Aeris looked over at the chopper, which had once been covered in Shin Ra logos, and was now devoid of any decal at all unless you looked at it from above, where three of the blades had been spray painted red to form a giant 'T' on the top, impossible to see in mid air as the speed make it look like a poorly made circle. Aeris approved, it did everything a logo should in spirit, while avoiding all the practical problems that traveling with a brand name caused.  
  
"Don't you want to hear it with everyone else?" Aeris asked, her gaze for the first time falling upon the face of Yuffie Kisargi, who was looking rather nauseous as she stared out of the helicopter window. That was one of the many weird things about dealing with the Planet, when Aeris had first heard that the Wutain ninja would be coming with the Turks she was shocked- but now, when she actually saw it, nothing. Life had become a lot less exciting since she'd died, honestly.  
  
Reno looked back at the helicopter, which was first settling in the dust, his mind playing back the carefully restrained tone Aeris had used on the phone. He turned back with a determined look set into his face. "No," he insisted, awaiting to hear what she had to say.  
  
"It's about your sister, Reno..." Aeris began, and then instantly realized she'd made a very large mistake.  
  
Every joint, muscle, feature and angle in Reno suddenly contracted, and for a split second he seemed to be sucking into his own body inside his blue suit like some sort of a turtle. Instead, after he went rigid the effect was very much like the effect you have on anything when you make it smaller without actually taking away from it- very concentrated, more Reno per inch Turk. "What about her?" he asked, his voice icy.  
  
"She's in Midgar." Aeris said, realizing that since she had thrown subtlety out the window already, she might as well simply get it all over with and hope that Reno survived the shock.   
  
"You think I don't know that?" Reno asked, his eyes blazing. He and the other Jackals had buried her themselves, his last interaction with any of them before he left, the final good bye Tseng had allowed him was putting his sister's body in the ground. Why should it come to any surprise to him now?  
  
"Reno..." Aeris began slowly, beginning to suspect Reno was a lot less ignorant of her meaning than he let on.  
  
"What??" he answered way too quickly and way too loudly, giving himself away immediately. He glanced back quickly at the chopper, which had landed, and the other Turks and the ninja brat were hastily leaping out of the side. "What the fuck about her??"  
  
"She's in Midgar *now*" Aeris said, hissing out the final word, at a loss of any other way to put it. The Planet hadn't actually told her a name for what it had done.  
  
Reno opened his mouth, for some sort of angry retort, but nothing came out, and he was left staring piercingly at Aeris with his mouth hanging downwards. He looked her over- he'd obviously heard of the Cetra's death- and for the briefest moment he turned around and stared at Tseng, then looked back towards Aeris with blazing eyes. "...where?" he said, his voice belied by his demeanor, almost too quiet to hear.  
  
Hesitantly, Aeris lifted her staff and pointed it down one of the many animal trails that lead away from the clearing. "Well," she muttered, biting her lip. "She'd in Midgar... well, Wall Market. Don Corneo's mansion actually, but-' she tried to rush out the last part to make sure Reno heard it, "there's no reason to rush over there, there's a young man with her who has it totally under con-" Her words were lost in the pounding of Reno's shoes on the ground as he charged down the path she'd singled out, obviously not giving a damn what the young man had totally under. Not caring about anything except finding his sister, and maybe learning a little more about what the fuck was going on.  
  
Aeris sighed. This would complicate things a little more then she wished to imagine. Griffon and Aurora needed time to form a bond strong enough that they'd protect each other with their lives, and with bigger brother always running in to play the knight in shining armor, that kind of bond would be made very difficult, complicating the trek the two had ahead of them. Oh well... maybe he'd get lost on the way. Maybe.  
  
With a deep breath, Aeris straightened her dress and turned back to the others. Aeris could recognize Rude more by his darkly tanned skin rather then his face as his head was covered entirely by a dark visored pilot's helmet. Typical even when he was flying he didn't let his eyes show. The flower girl tried to beckon them over to her side, only to watch as all of them except for Yuffie turned around and chased their red haired companion down the path, apparently uncaring of what or who had made him run, only dedicated to not letting him disappear in the woods.  
  
Yuffie watched them go down the trail with a curious look, then bounded over to Aeris' side with wide eyes, staring at her thought-to-be-deceased friend in amazement. The Midgar flower girl ignored the gawking of the young thief and stared after the fleeing Turks with a frown on her face. She let her staff droop a bit. "Why?" she asked no one in particular, "is everyone only in a hurry when I don't want them to be?"  
  
****  
  
Lyle Card, street name 'Shark', was sick and tired of having to wait his turn. Due to his decreased stature and less than perfect aim, he'd basically dropped down to the level of the gang's lapdog. He always got the last and the worst of everything, especially when they managed to grab some cutie girl off the streets. He'd even drawn the others attention to this one, but he'd been told in no uncertain terms to keep an eye on the boy until they were ready for him and to keep his hands to himself.  
  
A loud snapping sound jolted Shark out of his slow sulk, and he instantly ripped his pistol out of its holster and cocked the hammer back as the noise was followed by a heavy metal thud. And then another. A third. Lyle would have sworn they were footsteps if they'd been softer, but he doubted even an elephant was heavy enough to make that kind of noise, and the metal ring to it just confused him further. He decided not to risk it as the noise approached the stairway, and in one not-so-fluid, not-so-graceful move he sidestepped into the opening at the top of the stairs and he leveled his weapon, shying back as he prepared to fire. And then he stopped, disbelief filling his face.  
  
There was a suit of old antique armor propped up against the wall halfway up the stairs, topped with a horned helmet that was bowed down as if in reverence. Shark liked that, but even so... stunned, he glanced over his shoulder, trying to see why it was there- or who had put it there to begin with. He descended cautiously down the stairs, checking behind him every few steps as if the person responsible for the armor had somehow gotten behind him. He reached the armor itself a second later, and annoyed with his own ignorance of the situation, went to push it over. He was rewarded by seeing it tilt a bit, but otherwise it stayed still. Fully bewildered now, Lyle took another step down, coming up level with the armor just as the antique helmet tilted up to reveal a pair of luminescent red eyes.  
  
The Shark opened his mouth to scream but was cut off the hard way as cold metal fingers reached forward and wrapped entirely around his throat, locking it in a vise grip and choking down the noise. The kidnapper rapist could feel his face turn instantly purple and weakly raised his gun to fire into the armor. His weapon was ripped easily from his fist in a flash of movement to quick to see, and was crushed to a cube in the fist of the armor.  
  
The living suit lifted him off his feet with ease, so his feet were dangling at least two feet above the ground, and leaned in close to him. Shark attempted to peer into the helmet but his vision was blocked by the violent glare of its flickering red eyes. "Where..." a voice came from deep within the armor, deep and strained sounding, as if it had to fight against its own throat to be produced "is the girl?"  
  
Lyle could have cried as he writhed in the death grip. This was about the redhead slut? If this... thing... found out what they were going to do with her it'd rip his head off. Fuck it, he could have her. The man stopped trying to pry the metal fingers from around his throat and pointed to the left even as his vision started to go black around the edges. To his immense relief, that was specific enough for the armor, who dropped him to the stairs below, Lyle clutched his aching throat and sucked in one deep, painful breath.  
  
A breath that was crushed from his body as a metal foot lashed out, hitting him square in the chest and not stopping until it felt stone against the sole of its boot. Dead instantly, the late Shark slid unceremoniously down the armored leg, soaking it in blood.  
  
What appeared to be a suit of armor kicked its leg once, tossing the now limp body off of the appendage and sending it rolling down the stairs. The armor watched him fall for a moment, a sense of dull satisfaction in its aura, and then it turned and began up the stares.  
  
********  
  
Rory let loose with the most high pitched scream she could manage. Not because she was scared- she was, but she'd paid enough attention on the Midgar streets to learn that screaming would do absolutely nothing for fear- and not because she thought it would bring help- the walls were incredibly thick and the only other people in the place were freaks like this guy- but because she knew that when a scream hit a certain octave it could give even a deaf man an instant head ache. Women have been proving countless times over the centuries that absolutely no one wants to have sex with a head ache.  
  
Unfortunately her scream hadn't hit the right point, as Rory's burly attacker simply plowed forward and slammed into her, sending her crashing down hard onto her back to the stone floor. Rory pumped her legs, kicking up into a flip that would roll her to her feet, but the man (nick-named Ice by his crew for several obvious reasons) caught both of her ankles in his meaty fists and yanked her legs apart like a wishbone. She twisted around in his grip just enough to see him reach into his pocket and pull out a short, curved blade.  
  
Ice pressed the blade lightly against her thigh and ripped it down, easily slicing a new slit into her skirt but leaving her skin -much to her amazed relief- virtually unharmed. Rory new that the man had her, completely, and that infuriated her more than anything else in the world could, so she added clawing and biting to her last resistance of screaming. A few dozen claw marks soon laced all over Ice's arms, but he seemed entirely oblivious to the pain- one of the nice side effects of the drug that's name paralleled his own- and he was now within a few inches of cutting the waistband of her skirt. Rory could almost feel herself slipping into shock... this wasn't happening, this couldn't be happening, there's no way this was happening...  
  
The room flickered with a shadow for a second, as the doorway was filled with the bulk of a towering figure, who raised his hand forward as if he was going to strike. Rory could dimly make out his outline, but Ice was too preoccupied to notice until the figure moved away again and light filled the room. Thinking it was another gang member, he turned and barked over his shoulder, "Wait your turn, damnit!"  
  
He was facing a blank doorway. The figure had seen him, had seen Rory, but had more importantly had seen the man advancing in the shadow's behind them. He'd seen what the man held. And the figure, mind working quickly, had realized his original intent was about to be performed by the crouching man who was slowly advancing through the darkness. So Ice turned back around, muttering in annoyance, ready to return to staring at those fearful green eyes.  
  
Instead, he saw green eyes blazing with hatred, and the barrel of a Winchester Automatic Pistol. It would be the last thing he ever saw. A stream of bullet blew his teeth back through his brain, arcing a stream of pinkish god-knows-what out of the back of his skull and spraying it against the wall.  
  
Reno squeezed the trigger of his weapon and held it for a greatly exaggerated amount of time, empty shells launching up from the chamber of his gun and bouncing off his face as an entire clip of ammo sliced through Ice, who had just a second ago been hovering over his sister. The gangster flew back into the stone wall behind him as he was ripped apart by the hail storm of flying lead. Broken stone chips of wall and a broken body hit the ground at the same time, settling down into a twisted pile of red liquid and white dust.  
  
Rory screamed and went to back away, but she had no idea from what- the spreading pool of red that was draining from the man who'd tried to rape her or the active threat, the wide eyes psycho with a blood lust and a machine gun. In a split second she decided that if the armed man wanted her dead he could shoot her no matter where in the room she went, and she back pedaled frantically away from the corpse and slammed into her savior's legs. She looked up at him in terror the exact second he looked down at her.  
  
Two sets of bright emerald eyes widened in amazement.  
  
"Reno!?" Rory nearly screamed, leaping up into her older brother's arms and clung there for a moment while he didn't respond, but then he wrapped her in a bone crushing hug. She ignored both the bruises on her ribs he was pressing against and the difference in his looks as she held him, never having been more glad in her life to see her older brother. So what if he seemed taller, or if his hair looked like it had some gray in it, that could be caused by shoes and bad lighting. Who cares if there were scars slashed across his cheeks right under his eyes, people got scars all the time in Midgar- especially her brother. She had plenty herself, and despite the small changes this was undeniably Reno.  
  
Who was, meanwhile, staring down at her in awe. He'd never forgotten her voice- or anything else about her- but it still affected him to hear it in an unbelievable way. He wanted to say something, say anything, but all he could think of was how beautiful his little sister was, even her in a freezing room with ripped clothes and a still draining corpse lying across the floor in the corner. And then her still familiar voice rang out again, "Reno? What's going on? How did you know I was here? Why do you look so, well..."   
  
Reno decided to answer the easy questions first. "I, well," he stammered, finding for one of the few times in his life he didn't want to be talking, "I got a call from a... friend. And she knew you were here. And damn, Rory, I look different because seven years is a long time. None of that matters though! I mean, what you doing here? How are you... did you... how?"  
  
Rory had never heard her brother stammer before and it threw her off a little, so she decided to just ignore the comment about 'seven years' for now. "Well," she started, "I got grabbed by some big goons and they dragged me and- shit! There's a guy chained up down stairs we need to go get loose!" She finished the last part over her shoulder as she made for the hall that led to the stairwell, but Reno managed to catch her arm and spun her around. Normally she'd have snapped at him and smacked his hand away, but the look in his eyes was so intense it stopped her dead.  
  
Reno was studying her face hard, almost as if he expected her to be someone else in disguise. "How did you come back!?" he asked with an edge of horror in his voice, but he was drawing only a blank stare from her little sister.  
  
"Back?" she asked, trying to make an ounce of sense about what he was saying, "I didn't, you came to me. Back from where?"  
  
He didn't really know how to answer that. Didn't she know? Didn't she remember? And what the hell was he supposed to say if she didn't? From the morgue? From the cheap over crowded graveyard we buried you in during the middle of the night, with Tseng waiting by the gate and with Caiman's blood still streaked over my hands? "From the dead, damnit!"  
  
For a moment Rory wasn't sure if she was supposed to laugh or not. Was he kidding? She sure as hell didn't think it was funny if he was. Or was it some kind of metaphor? Was he drunk? Or was she... oh god, was she actually dead? "Dead?" she practically squeaked, "I'm dead?"  
  
Her brother seemed even more confused than she was as he nodded his head slowly, then amended the action by shaking it from side to side. "Well..." he trailed off, "you were. You aren't now, obviously. Don't you remember? Any of it? I mean, the hospital, Caiman, the Vipers?"  
  
Rory nodded slowly in response, not sure if she should be feeling more upset then she was. Sure it was disturbing to have imagine having died, but it was one of those things that just felt distant, like it had happened to some else a long time ago. After all, she was right here, fine, talking and very much alive.  
  
It didn't matter. She went to answer how the entire episode with the Vipers had seemed like a half forgotten dream when she was cut off by a sudden burst of gunfire. Reno grabbed her by the shoulders and dived to the ground, rolling as they landed and ripping out his nightstick in favor of his nearly empty machine gun. He ended up not having to use either one. A man slumped in the shadows, head twisted sideways, stomach blasted open. A pistol rested in his now limp fingers, a pistol that just a moment ago had been pointing at the back of Reno's head.  
  
Rude walked into the room calmly, a smoking revolver in his hand. Reno checked to see if his sister was ok- she was, just a little overwhelmed- and then walked over to the gunned down man and prodded him with his toe. The man didn't stir. "Rude?" Reno asked, peering closely at the mans gaping stomach wound, "how many times did you shoot him, six? I've never seen you waste bullets..."  
  
Behind his mirrored sun glasses, Rudes eyes flickered down the hall that lead from the room. "I didn't," he said slowly, raising his gun again and preparing to fire.  
  
"Hey!" popped a terrified sounding voice from down the hall, "put that thing down! I'm here as friend, damnit, I'm just trying to make Rory's all right and then I'll go get out of your ha- uh, scalp, and find my way home, all right? Just lower the gun." Gabriel peered out from around the wall, watching Rude warily, quite visibly disarming the handgun he held in his fist, snatched up from the corpse of Ice. A wisp of smoke was trailing from the barrel.  
  
Rude turned back to Reno. "See? I only fired one shot." The bald man titled his victims head back the other way, revealing a bullet hole in the side of his neck. "Right there."  
  
Rory beckoned Gabriel forward and smiled at her brother, even though she was inwardly hoping he wouldn't take the boy's head off. "Gabriel's been helping me out," she said, "he tried to save me when these freak's chased me down."  
  
The was an awkward pause as Reno studied Gabriel calmly, then slowly extended his hand. Gabriel took it, but instead of shaking, Rory's older brother pulled him within whisper distance. Here it comes, Rory groaned inwardly, either the inaudible death threat that would turn Gabriel's blood cold or worse yet- a simple punch that would result in her friend waking up in a week or two. But Reno's purpose, surprisingly, was much less violent. "She really lets you call her Rory?" he asked, a small grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.  
  
Gabriel nodded, grinning back.  
  
*********  
  
Tseng leaned back against the bullet ridden wall, watching Reno and his sister's conversation but not joining in himself. He was extremely unsettled, with his resurrection, Rory's, and the fact he could have sword to God he'd heard the name Gabriel before but couldn't remember for the life of him from where. He did know it was from some time a ago, a time he didn't really want to visit again in his life.  
  
Rude walked in from the top of the stairs, looking somewhat paler than usual- he'd gone down to the dungeon to see if any of the other gang members were still around, they didn't need any surprises. The bald man went straight to Tseng, beckoning him closer and shooting Griffon a disturbed glance. "Well," he said, "the good news is there's only one guy down there, and he's dead."  
  
Here it comes. A surprise. Great. "And the bad?" Tseng asked, not really wanting Rude to answer him.  
  
Rude held up his hands to indicate a circle about the size of a basketball. "He had a hole in his chest this big."  
  
The both of them turned again to look at Gabriel, who smiled and waved back at them, his smile suddenly faltering as he saw the skepticism in their faces.  
  
"What?" he asked. 


	8. Warning: All Hell has Broken Loose

[Note to Reviewer: Yep, Gabriel is one of the two original characters in this story]  
  
Greven Sickle knew that he was about to die. He understood that horrible fact perfectly, and he knew that there was no point in running. But the knowledge of futility was nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the horror he fled, the holocaustal chaos that still raged behind him. Most of the villagers hadn't even *seen* the monster before they started dying, falling to the ground with purple faces and wide eyes, clawing at their throats in a final attempt to remove whatever it was that was clogging their wind pipes.  
  
And then the devil appeared, for it could be nothing less evil of powerful than that. It towered above even the center piece of the town, the Condor Tower, with a flawless muscular torso that rippled like liquid with movement. Its head and face were the right shape but completely devoid of any distinguishable features, and that was where any slight resemblance to human features ended. Its body rested on what seemed to be a machine, a cyclindral base loaded with an armies worth of artillery that was supported by eight metallic, spider-like legs that seemed to go on forever in any direction.  
  
Fort Condor's militia, at least the ones who hadn't suffocated on God knows what, had attempted to put together a doomed resistance. They rallied against the monster as it began to open fire on any structure that was standing, but they had been utterly annihilated by rolling waves of flame that had seemed to emanate from the rampaging creature itself.  
  
Greven had tried to duck behind a wall, but a wave of flame had still struck him across the arm, lighting his sleeve up in flames. He'd made a frantic attempt to beat out the flames that simply refused to be extinguished and instead seemed to raise higher and spread out to consume the rest of his jacket. He'd started sprinting then, making as much as a straight line as he could, while still avoiding the dead bodies, towards the town's water reservoir. He would dive in to smother the flames, salvage what was left of his belongings as the monster continued its rampage, and then run as fast as his legs could carry him towards the distant Cosmo Canyon, and safety.  
  
The burning man slammed hard into a broken upshot of wood he hadn't seen before and stumbled, falling into the dirt and rolling with the momentum. The water was in plain view now, he only had to crawl forward a few more yards and he would be fine, a few more yards, and everything would be just f-  
  
A lone missile fireball rocketed through the air, sizzling the oxygen around it, and arched down to the spot where Greven lay. There was a small explosion, and Greven, in the center of it all, knew that absolutely nothing would ever be fine again. His entire body was on fire, and he passed on from this plane of existence staring at his so-near-yet-so-far watery salvation, with a single, mournful thought racing through his mind. The monster had waited, intentionally, for him to get this close, to come this far, before striking him down with the force of God himself.  
  
Hojo didn't even bother to watch the body of the pathetic mortal burn to cinders, it would only be a passing pleasure. Useless emotion. Besides, there was still a few survivors left, cowering in the wreckage, and letting anyone escape to spread word of his assault would be simply idiotic. He could sense four of them left, three hiding in the broken shell of a building, and another having locked himself in a metal trailer. Stupid. And annoying. He couldn't reach any of them with his fire, so he would have to pursue alternative measures, and adding variables to the situation was not something he wanted to do. The scientist processed his annoyance for one moment, before marking it as just another, impractical emotion, and discarding it. Hojo quickly summoned forth the image of the man he'd just slain, surprised that it had remained in his mind for even the short amount of time from then until now. Perhaps something odd was going on... besides for him.  
  
***  
  
Colonel Wise watched on in horror as the spider-beast continued to rain down hellfire and brimstone onto his hometown. His wife and daughter were cowering together in the corner behind him, shaking and clutching each other, making small mewling noises as if they were a pair of wounded kittens.  
  
There was a crash as a stooped over figure suddenly stumbled into their hiding place, and the Colonel dove in front of his family as he drew his gun, ready to die and kill for them-  
  
-only to heave a startled sigh of relieve as the figure managed to straighten up, revealing a face bloody and marred by burns, but it was a familiar face nonetheless. It has his best friend, and even though his clothes hung off him in singed tatters, and he could hardly stand, he was very much alive. "Greven!?" Weiss gasped, slipping an arm around his friends shoulders to help support him. "I thought you were dead! What the hell happened?"  
  
Greven stared at him incomprehensibly for a moment, bilking, and Weiss realized his friend was slowly going into shock. Suddenly the man doubled over, and spitting what Weiss could only pray to God wasn't blood onto the floor, straightened out again. "I," he managed to moan, clutching at his stomach. The sheer effort it was taking him to talk appalled Weiss, "reached the water."  
  
An explosion rocked outside, causing the girls in the corner to squeal and bundle in even closer together, and the two men looked at the same time to the left, out the window, and while Weiss drooped at the horror he saw Greven actually seemed to be gaining some of his strength back. "Give me one of your guns," he said resolutely, clenching his hands into fist. Weiss pretended not to notice the drips of blood that formed between the cracks of his knuckles and fell to the floor.  
  
Trying to humor his friend in what had to be one of the last minutes of the horribly injured mans life, Weiss dropped to one knee to pull the revolver from his boot holster, but looked up when he saw Greven begin to sway, ready to dive and catch his friend if he fell. The man seemed to twist in the air, and suddenly lurched forward, into Colonel Weiss's readied arms.  
  
The Colonel, for his part, didn't cry out when he caught him. Most people wood, with a 200 pound momentum driving two serrated silver blades through either of your shoulders. Instead he stared blankly, going into a shock of his own, into the face of the man he'd thought was his best friend. The face was the same, but as his eyes dropped towards the floor a moment before he passed out he saw Greven's chest, distorted and bulging, hands shrunken into some kind of silver metal that had punctured the outer edges of both of his lungs.  
  
***  
  
Hojo had developed enough hearing to recognize the dull thud of a large man collapsing to the ground. The females were suddenly screaming, as the click of two pistols being armed sounded within seconds of each other. They fired simultaneously, one driving its bullet into the temple of the fallen Colonel, and the other slamming through both the mother and the daughter she had clutched to her chest. And then... silence. With a wave of his hand, Hojo dissipated the collection of cells and debris he had formed into the shape of Greven.  
  
All that was left with the man in the trailer, and Hojo ambled almost casually over to examine it, spider legs picking delicately through the grounds, always managing to land on something of value or another. The trailer was just one of the smaller toys in the city to play with, a little match box car at his disposable.  
  
The former Shinra scientist had always hated toy trucks.  
  
In an almost bored motion, Hojo extended his arm with the hand open and the palm face up. A visible tremor ran through the trailer as the makeshift muscles in the arm tensed, and Hojo suddenly squeezed his hand into a tight fist. The trailed crushed in on itself to the size of a baseball in less than a second, steely sides rupturing to spray out blood and gore with the force of a punctured fire house.  
  
Sprayed with the mess was Hojo, who paused for a moment, body going into total stillness. There was no breath, no heart beat, to even shake his skin. And then he laughed. And laughed. Head thrown back, chest thrown out, eyes wide and glowing, Hojo let loose with a loud, maniacal laugh, that was heard even a half mile away by the figures standing in a silent vigilance of the scene ahead. The one on all fours bowed his head to the ground, uttering an ancient prayer. For the lives lost, for those that would soon be, and for the Planet itself- which very well might die with everything else. 


	9. Hell, Still Broken, Still Loose

[Im not so fantastic at action scenes- one happens later this chapter- so when you get finished with it, Id appreciate if you would drop me a review and let me know what you thought]  
  
Reno cast a wary glance around the forest, looking as much for the path he had sprinted down to Midgar for something to blast to hell with the Nightstick he had tightly clenched in his fist so tight his knuckles were white. His normal paranoia was mingling with a fanatic devotion to protect his sister better then he had in the past, the darkness that was creeping through the already intimidating forest and a general aura of something bad about to go down. Rory and Gabriel were walking behind him on Reno's insistence, and the other three Turks were behind them. Reno was the only one ignoring the conversation that was going on between the five, comparing notes, stories, and scars; so he was startled when he heard his name behind him.  
  
"Uh, Reno, there is still no path here. Why is there still no path here? You said there would be a path here but, nope, no path. Where is the path, Reno?" Elena said in a singsong voice, knowing she was egging Reno on and loving it. He acknowledged her comment with a scalding glance but nothing else, not giving her the satisfaction of any kind of a verbal reply. He turned back on his way to start walking again but jerked and fell back, raising his Nightstick and spinning behind a tree. It took a second, but the rest took his example, the three Turks dropping to their knees and drawing their respective firearms. Rory only stared for a moment, but Gabriel grabbed her arm and yanked her behind a tree, and the two hit the dust out of sight.  
  
About ten seconds later, five men trotted across the path they would have been crossing themselves. They were dirty and unbathed, but also rippled with muscles and heavily armed. Each had a serial number prison tatoo on their left arms which they displayed as if proud by cutting that sleeve of their shirts off. Reno waited until theyd stepped past him then popped out behind them, and all three spun instantly raising their aresenals of sawed off shotguns, hand-guns, and Reno even recognized a brand new AK-7. He stared as if stunned at them for a moment, then pasted a huge phony grin on his face.  
  
"Hi! How are yall doin today!?" he practically yelled in an exaggerated Gonganan drawl to cover his streets of Midgar accent and thus place himself as less of a threat, one of the dozens of accents he was fluid in faking being the almost doting sound of the forest town. "I got kinda lost in here and I'm trying to get to my house back in the woods. You haven't seen it, have you?"  
  
They stared at him blankly for a few moments and the tension increased with each one. Finally the one with the sub-machine gun stepped forward, and though he kept his weapon leveled, the dangerous gleam had left his eyes, and Reno allowed the slightest degree of tension to go out of his legs, the ability to bound to the side and roll diminished just a bit. After all, at this distance and with a gun like that, any dodging maneuvers he tried wouldn't matter anyway.  
  
"Are you going to The Gathering?"  
  
Reno's forced his eyes to light up as he mentally pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil to take some private notes.  
  
"Yes! The Gathering! That's exactly where I'm going! I just, uh, forgot where it was so I was going back to my house to check the tablet I wrote it down on."  
  
The thug stared at him again and lowered his weapon, his agressive posture dropping away and revealing a far less physically intimidating man than it had first appeared. "What are you, an idiot, its at Fort Cond-" there was a pause as the man's eyes widened in realization and his gun came up right against Reno's adam's apple so close it pushed it back into his throat and cut off his fake words of surprise. "Let me see your hand."  
  
Reno's surprise was genuine now, and he glanced around to make sure his crew was hidden, then down at the man's hand. A fading wound was there, just about to give away its last remnants of redness into a bright white scar. The man impatiently grabbed Reno's hand and jerked it up, staring at his palm which was heavily scarred... but not by the same "H" shape that resided on him. His eyes suddenly came in an angry focus, and he calmly squeezed the trigger on his gun.  
  
Dozens of bullets leaped through the air with resounding gun shots, severing flesh, adams apple, vocal chord, voice box, spinal cord and finally flesh again as they ripped out the back. Reno fell straight back and landed on his side, his eyes closed tightly.   
  
An AK-7 clattered to the ground beside him, with the shattered form of the man who'd been about the blast Reno's head off. The red headed Turk cautiously opened one eye, realized he was very much alive and wasn't seeing the gates of Hell he knew awaited him, and opened the other one.  
  
Tseng, Elena, and Rude were on their feet, smoking pistols out, teeth bared. Reno felt a rush of relief until he looked beside them. The remaining 4 of the 5 thugs stood with gun's against the Turk's back, and were growling something to them too quiet for Reno to hear. They were ignoring him, Reno realized, they must think he was dead. The look on Elena's face revealed so did the Turks. He lay still but looked around more, to the place where Gabriel and Rory had dissapeared in. He couldn't see them, but apparently the punks with weapons to his friend's backs couldn't either. Reno groaned quietly to himself. There were 4 men about to kill his friends, they were all armed, and there was 10 feet between them. A machanical click sounded as a gun was armed, then three more. Reno slowly began to rise to his feet, squinting in the setting sun that was directly behind the men.   
  
A shadow rose in the sun, popping up as if from no where and then leapt forward. It hit one of the men directly in the back, sending him sprawling. Tseng and Rude spun around, but Tseng's guard had been much more competent and bashed the holster of his gun into Tseng's temple, dropping him instantly. Rude threw a fumbled punch that was parried, and caught a boot to the stomach that took him down to his knees. The unoccupied thug raised his gun and leveled it at Elena's head, who stared at him with wide eyes as he fired. The shot went 6 inches wide as Reno slammed into the man's stomach with a head long tackle and knocked the gun away. Gabriel, the sudden shadow, and his attacker were struggling to choke the life out of each other, rolling over and over in the ground, all weapons forgotten as they squeezed each others throats closed and through close range punches.   
  
Rude got fully laid out with a knee to the face and Reno had to leave his man behind to prevent his best friend from catching a bullet, grabbing the man about to fire and slugging him in the face. A pistol cracked and Reno fell with man he'd socked, trailing blood from the bullet hole that'd suddenly appeared in his shoulder. He curled into a fetal position on the gorund and cursed, trying to ignore the pain and regain his feet. Elena began to frantically search for her pistol on the ground as a snap rang out... Gabriel had broken his opponents neck and had dived on the man who'd shot Reno desperately, the flying bullet from the second shot had just missed his head by an inch, and he wanted to be sure a third one wasn't fired.  
  
Elena scooped up her gun and looked around frantically, trying to find someone to shoot, the chaos of the situation overwhelming her senses so she didn't see the man leveling his gun at her until it was too late, until he was about to pull the trigger.  
  
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"  
  
The gun dropped witht he man, as he gripped his leg and screamed. Elena rolled behind a tree for cover but not before seeing the tip of a broken branch jutting out through the front of he would-be killer's thigh. She pressed her gun against the tree to level her aim and fired three times, two of them catching the man in the chest and the third just under the chin of his laid back head as he fell, slicing up through his brain and out the top of his skull. He hit the ground hard and didn't move. The blonde Turk glanced around the woods, Rory was no where to be seen, Tseng, Rude, and Reno were laid out on the ground, and Gabriel- was about to have a knife buried in his heart from the man who'd pinned him to the ground. Elena re-adjusted her aim for a killing shot and squeezed the trigger.  
  
Click.  
  
Out of bullets.   
  
There was a metal flash, but it wasn't the knife descending. A large metal disk whirled through the air and struck the man in the chest. A chakram. Elena looked behind over her shoulder and saw Yuffie, eyes wide at the seen in front of her, hand out from unleashing the killing disc. It was too much for the poor Turk, too many images hitting her mind, too many possible death's of her friend's happening even then... her mind unleashed it's one defense to such an enviroment.  
  
There was a dull thud as Elena passed out.  
  
**************************  
  
Her eyes fluttered open with Rude leaning over her with a concerned look on his face, sunglasses broken and hanging askew over his eyes. He gave a visible smile at seeing her move and leaned back, offering her a hand to help her up. She took it and rose shakily to her feet, sweeping the area to see the condition of her friends. Gabriel was sitting by Tseng on a stump, holding a red rag against the blood flowing wound on the leading Turk's head and unconsiously rubbing his throat. Reno was gulping down what looked like a gallon and a half of liqour to drown out the pain that he must be feelign under the hastily made bandage that was wrapped around his arm. Rory was sitting next to him, staring in a dull sort of way at her hands that were bright with red blood that wasn't her own. She'd been the one who'd buried the broken stick in that one guys leg who was about to blast her.  
  
But there was something else in her eyes, too, some foreign confusion. Though no one knew it before, seeing Reno's arm bandaged reminded her of something, of how limply and uselssly the arm of her travelling companion had been when they'd first woken up in the dungeon. She stared at him now as he helped recuperate Tseng with both arms, as they both moved as fluently and functional as ever.  
  
"How you doing?"  
  
Elena turned around quickly, her tense nerves jangling, but relazxed instantly when she saw Yuffie offering her a canteen. She took it and took a few nervous gulps, then offered it back with a shaky hand. Rude placed his hand on her shoulder in a surprising show of reassuring affection. She took a deep breath and exhaled.  
  
"I'm OK, I guess. My head's still swimming though... the last thing I remeber is... wait, where did you come from anyway?"  
  
Yuffie laughed and downed a good portion of the canteen before answering. "Aeris knew Reno would get lost... I don't think it was her mystic Ancient mojo either, Reno's an idiot. I thought he was gonna get himself killed, personally. You really do hang with some dumb mother f- oops, hi Rude..."  
  
The dark skinned man stared at her sharply through his poorly repaired glasses but looked as if he was trying to keep a grin from busting out on his face. He removed his hand from Elena's shoulder and walked over to Reno to share a gulp of the Skotch. Elena watched him go almost regretfully and turned back to Yuffie. "So how far are we from Aeris'... did Reno have us completely lost?"  
  
Yuffie laughed again, "Actually, she's just over that hill... you know, the one Reno was about to lead you directly away from. I'd only left to find you about 30 seconds before I did. I'd say it was lucky, but, well, Aeris and her creepy Cetra magic usually are the real cause of 'luck'. We were only waiting for you to wake up."  
  
Elena nodded, took a final drink of water, then wiped her lips. "Well I won't hold up the group anymore... let's go." Riding high on bravado, she went to surge to her feet, and suddenly realized she was looking for strength in her legs that simply wasn't there. She half rose, then plopped back down to the ground, clenching her teeth at the sudden jolt of pain that rang up her spinal chord. Above her, Yuffie managed to hold down a laugh.  
  
"It's OK," the Wutain said, "we can wait until you are ready."  
  
**************  
  
Reno gave the cute little fairy tale cottage a once over before shaking his head in disgust and walking up to the door. He actually thought about knocking with his undamaged arm, a rarity for him, but it was obviously a notion he ignored as he yanked the door open and took a step forward... then dropped back cursing and rubbing his bleeding nose. "What the fuck!?"  
  
He tilted his head back and then snorted, spraying a light red mist out his nostrils, and reached weakly forward into the doorway. His hands met something solid. He pressed against it and found it completely unyielding, then sighed in defeat and rapped on the doorframe, leaning against the invisible wall in front of him. A soft and familiar girls voice floated from inside the house.  
  
"Come in..."  
  
Reno's feet swept backwards as he fell forward onto his face, the wall in front of his suddenly dissapearing. Elena and Yuffie stepped over his growling form, but Rory and the guys stopped to help him up. The look in his eyes could safely be assessed as nuclear as he brushed his blue jacket off and marched forward. Aeris stepped into the room, pink dress fluttering behind her, and laughed at the image of the swelled up, glaring, and bleeding Reno. He opened his mouth, probably to bite her head off, but was interrupted and completely ignored due to another rapping on the door. The group turned quickly and jumped at the visage of Cloud Strife standing in the doorway, eyes narrowed and locked on Tseng's. Aeris managed a hasty 'come in' before the two leaders moved forward nsoe to nose, eyes locked, pressing against each other to make the other back down. Cloud looked a lot more confused then pissed, however, the one lead to the other with him anyway.  
  
"What the fuck are you doing here!?"  
  
Tseng glared down at him, towering at least 3 inches higher, and curled his lips into a sneer. "I could ask you the same question, boy."  
  
Blue eyes flashed, "It's been a long time since anyone's called me a boy."  
  
Black eyes flashed in return, "I know, but I've seen your Soldier reports. I know your a male."  
  
Reno barked out a laugh as Aeris feebly tried to pry to two apart, but her efforts were in vain. The two were steadfast, two years of rage and hate behind their stances. The tension mounted for a moment, before Cloud hissed in Tseng's face.  
  
"Why don't you take you brood of rats and leave Aeris alone before I make Sephiroth's job on you stick."  
  
Aeris stopped here, giving Cloud an exasperated look. Typical he didn't ask what exactly she was doing alive and in the wood's, but jumped to her 'defense' like the perfect knight in armor. Tseng did anything but stop though, he exploded from his stance, hitting Cloud on both shoulders with open palm strikes, sending him backwards out the doorway and onto his back. The ex-Soldier was on his feet in a second, whirling around and drawing his Ultima Weapon in one move. Tseng could have easily drawn his handgun and opened fire, but Cloud had insulted his Turks, and he was going to rip him apart one on one. Reno called his name out and tossed something to him that Tseng caught in one hand and twirled as he advanced, ignoring Aeris' now frantic plea's for them to stop.   
  
Cloud lashed out first, swinging his sword down in an over hard strike that Tseng easily blocked with Reno's nightstick, then dropped to one knee and spun around, kicking Cloud's legs out from under him and sending him to the ground. He was back on his feet in the same move and brought the nightstick down lightly, almost lazily. Cloud twisted his sword to block it and did so easily, then narrowed his eyes in realization of what was pressed against his weapon. Tseng grew a small smile as he thumbed the weapons trigger, sending 10,000 volts of electricity through the Ultima Weapon and into Cloud's arm. He jerked, twitching as the Electricity ran through his body. Tseng squeezed the trigger a little harder and Cloud squeezed his eyes tightly, growling in pain and anger. Tseng went to unleash full power onto the blue clad fighter but was knocked off balance as a powerful weight smacked into his side and sent him stumbling. He looked up glaring, to see Tifa hovering above Cloud, fists up, massive chest heaving with her heavy breathing. Tseng could glimpse Barret towering behind her, Cid and Cait behind them.  
  
His eyes narrowed in recognition, then darted to the house where the Turks were rapdily drawing weapons.  
  
His lips curled into a smile.  
  
Sensing the incredible danger that everyone within a five mile radium of her house was in, Aeris began to scream at all of them. Telling them how stupid they were being. To tell them that they were all supposed to be on the same side. But she was interrupted, yet again, by a round a metallic clicks. Rude, Reno, Elena- and, to Rory's surprise, with a shaky determination Gabriel raising his fists- armed their weapons and pointed them at the moments of Avalanche.  
  
There was a pause. On one side stood the Turks, various pistols armed and aimed, and Tseng, who still loomed near the crouching Cloud, who was on the side of the Avalanche members, gripping their respective weapons tightly. Way off to the side stood Aeris and Yuffie.  
  
The wind slowly began to pick up, kicking dust around their ankles. A little at first, and then a little more. Tseng could feel his hair whipping around his face, before he felt his legs ripped out from under him, and he was literally flying in the hair. His borrowed weapon was ripped from his hands, and he managed to see a fleeting glimpse of Cloud losing his grip on his Ultima Weapon. He felt himself being lifted three, then five feet in the air, and when he managed to look around he saw that the others were being lifted up as well. Suddenly, the winds around them died, and as a group they fell down to the earth, slamming against the ground. Groaning, Tseng looked up at Aeris, who had her staff raised high above her sad, and she literally seemed to be radiating energy. Their weapons, including Cait Sith, were still floating lazily in the air.  
  
"Now," she said evenly, "can we talk?" 


	10. The Legacy

Sephiroth was sitting straight up on the bed, calmly cleaning his Masanume when Aeris stomped into the house and straight towards their room. He allowed himself a subtle smile for the briefest of moments, before jamming his face into the frozen sneer he always wore when addressing Aeris. He'd been able to watch the going ons outside through a one way window that simply appeared as more wall to people who were trying to look in from the outside. He had to admit he was impressed with how easily Aeris was managing to control the new powers that the Planet had granted her. Unlike her, he'd chosen to keep his own abilities somewhat contained and hadn't flaunted them- but bravado notwithstanding, it had been an impressive display.  
  
"What," Aeris uncharacteristically growled as she entered the room, slamming the door behind her with a flourish, "in the name of the Almighty Planet do I need to do to get these pigheaded idiots to work together!?" Sephiroth shot the former flower girl an indignant look at the intrusion on his peace, but she completely ignored it, and he simply shrugged his massive shoulders.  
  
"Nothing", he stated, and Aeris could swear she actually saw his usually dead eyes glittering. "They wont work together. They wont get along. Oh, sure, they have their groups, they'll get along fine. But as a whole... they wont be able to defeat Hojo." He finished with his Masanume and slid it into his sheath, and started on his spiky white armor. White. And a little gold trimming. The absolute polar opposite of his old colors. Some stupid hang up of the planet or of Aeris had to have something to do with this, but he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of mentioning it.  
  
Aeris tapped back to her roots as a little girl and slapped a stubborn look onto her face. "They have to be able to defend him," she argued, "or the Planet wouldn't have bothered to choose them. Its not like their aren't billions of other options."  
  
Sephiroth laughed, but not with the chilling, insanity wrecked voice had used so often in the past, but a short and mocking one, with a small reflection of actual humor involved. "I never said," he began, taking a deep breath, "that they wouldn't be able to defeat my father. I said they aren't strong enough now. It's so blatantly obvious, you must see it."  
  
Aeris opened her mouth, and then closed it. "Well," she started, but simply trailed off.  
  
He didn't really care to let her stumble through the rest of her sentence. "Why the blazes do you think the planet sent me? Truly? For redemption? You must be kidding. This world isn't as happy and fun and forgiving as you would like to believe. I know things. I learned a thing or two in Hojo's library under Shin-Ra mansion. There was some holes, of course, but I pieced an amazing amount of it together in the Lifestream."  
  
Aeris looked up at him, both intrigued and surprised by his sudden bought of talketiveness. He usually answered her in a very literal snarl, and two word sentences. "What are you trying to say, Sephiroth?" she asked. "Quickly, please, they aren't going to stay out there for very long before somebody kills someone else!"  
  
"An interesting thought," he quipped, "and this isn't really something I can rush. My masanume, for example, it was given to me by Shin Ra. Your staff, you returned with it, a gift from the Planet. I've seen them both before in a very less real world form, in the pages of a book that was simply called The Legacy..."  
  
***  
  
Reno drummed his fingers methodically against the aged wooden couch arm that he was leaning against, glaring ice coated daggers in a sweep across the room where it was returned with a half dozen equally hateful gazes. He quickly darted a glance at his wrist watch for the seventh time in the same number of seconds, and silently cursed Aeris and whatever fucking thing she had gone off to do. One more look at his watch... shed left a half hour ago!  
  
He still wasn't entirely sure what had prompted her to storm out. Perhaps it she needed some air, the tension in the room was definitely enough to choke someone to their knees. Maybe she had something she needed to prepare. Or maybe, of course, she was just a bit frustrated when she'd healed Reno's wounded arm, and he'd instantly used it to take a swing that had missed by a hairs breath from breaking Cloud's nose.  
  
It had taken all the self restraint in his body to force himself to sit in the couch by his fellow Turks, his sister, and Gabriel. As opposed to oh, say, leaping over the table that sat in the middle of the room, grabbing hold of Strife's wrists, and pulling in either direction until tendons stretched, snapped, and the limbs would pop put of their sockets. And then he'd use the limbs to beat Strike into a very ugly submission.  
  
A grin stretched across Reno's face. That damn near euphoric thought had bought him... 8 seconds. The grin disappeared, and Reno contemplated smashing his watch with the heaviest object around. He growled. "Where in the fuck is she, anyway!?"  
  
Gabriel leaned back slightly from his spot on the floor, glancing up at Reno, apparently he only one who had heard Reno's mumbled curse. He shot the head a small smile that absolutely no one in the room shared, and tilted his hands towards the equally bored, equally irritated, and equally impatient Avalanche. It brightened Reno up just enough to cover the three remaining seconds of waiting, and said something for the kid on the floor that he had picked up on Reno's not only professional but personal hatred of most of the other people in the room.  
  
"I'm right here, Reno," and so she was, her usually bright and perky- or at the very least, serene- face drawn tight and lined with concern, stretched out by grim determination and a definite over loud of seriousness. They look put them all off a peg or two, especially Cloud, who was stunned how Aeris could change her entire appearance from girl to women simply because of the mood she was currently in.  
  
Reno blinked, shocked, because the door she had just walked out of was at least twenty feet away from her, and Gabriel was the only one who had reacted to what he'd said- that was including people who had been in the immediate vicinity. One thing that he knew for sure was that he would never get used to all this mako, Lifestream, and Ancient shit. Dead people popping up everywhere these days. It didn't make any sense, you just couldn't put any logic to it.  
  
A half dozen people leapt to their feet or opened their mouths to speak, but soon found that a search for the right words- or any words at all- was in vain. They each put out a few more futile attempts, particularly Tseng, who prided himself on his abilities with words... and who had been dying to scream at somebody since he had first waken up so many hours ago.  
  
"Please," she began, holding up both of her hands like a teacher instructing her students to be quiet. You all have questions for me, or each other, and I know you all have something to say. I hope I can answer a good deal of your questions before you even need to ask them, and maybe even some of them you haven't thought to ask yet. As most of you have long known, and I hope the rest of you have been informed, I was killed over a year ago by a renegade Soldier named Sephiroth. He drove a seven foot sword through my back, and all the way out my stomach."  
  
Cloud opened his mouth to interrupt, but again, no words would come out. Reno allowed himself a mental snicker- he didn't seem to be able to do it out loud- at how remarkably Cloud looked like a fish as he stared almost bug eyed, his jaw working ceaselessly and pointlessly. Aeris took the moments pause to casually reach down and unfasten the 5th button down on her dress, pulling apart the material on either side a few inches in the opposite directions, exposing her navel. Resting directly above it was a small, almost silver scar. It was three inches tall but hardly a centimeter thick, and wouldn't have been intimidating at all if it wasn't for the common knowledge that it ran all the way through. Rory, always fascinated by scars, scooted forward a few feet across the floor just to see it better.  
  
Rising shakily, Cloud slowly extended a finger, stopping it a hairsbreath from the ancient wound. He traced it in the air with a trembling finger, back and forth, several times. He looked up at her, and once again went to speak, and yet again he could not. Aeris suddenly felt bad about the simply spill she had placed on the room to make sure that they wouldn't interrupt her tale. The confusion and the sorrow, regret unearthed, was stitched plainly into every line on Cloud's face. He sat down again, hard, a simple stunned mask twisted across his face.  
  
"Before you," she said, "you see a wound healed and scarred over in a little over a years time. But I am the last Cetra, the last person able to speak clearly with the Planet. So I was healed. Skin was stitched back together with skin, organs were rebuilt from newly grown tissue, fused my spine together. It returned me to life, returned my essence to a body that was whole once again, a body that wouldn't be healed for eons.  
  
"I am not the only one who has been granted this chance," Aeris continued, picking up the pace a bit. "Tseng Chet, Rory Tremaine, Gabriel Lucia. You all stand in a world that a week ago, you only inhabited as a part of the ground itself."  
  
There was a pause, while the unsinkable tried to sink into the collective group. It confirmed a lot of peoples thoughts, guesses, hopes, fears... but at the same time added a whole new layer of all of that on the top of their minds. Tseng was simply nodding somberly, but Gabriel and Rory didn't even seem to be coherent, and they looked at her as if she had simply called attendance in class. Finally, like a stretched rope snapping under the weight of a rock, the truth broke over them- or at least her version of it- and the sheer look on their faces was enough to cause her to drop the Silence enchantment. It was astounding how quickly she wished she hadn't.  
  
Noise poured into the room, as if every single individual sitting around her had never stopped attempting to talk even when it was clear that it was useless to try. The questions, denials, and outright accusations were overwhelming the Cetra couldn't even get a grasp on who or what was talking, and was forced to focus her spell again, but this time she did her best to leave it weaker around the teenagers, hopefully giving them a chance to say their piece. Gabriel's eyes were wide.  
  
"Uh, Miss..." he stated weakly, and Rory looked over at him in surprise, unused to seeing him nervous.  
  
"Aeris," Aeris corrected him.  
  
"Uh, Aeris, right..." he blinked, then swallowed. "I'm not exactly sure how to say this without sounding like an absolute lunatic, but I'm not, uh, a zombie."  
  
Aeris stared at him for a moment. "Neither is anyone else in this room."  
  
"Right, right... but I'm not dead, either."  
  
"Once again, no one else in this room is dead either."  
  
"Well..." Gabriel tried again, obviously searching for the right words to form his denial. "But I never was."  
  
"Unfortunately, that is no altogether true. In fact, you have been dead twice before now. When you were fourteen years old a poorly mixed rush of cocaine stopped your heart for four minutes." Aeris reminded him mildly. On the couch, Reno cocked an eyebrow, trying once again to size up the young man.  
  
"But that's not... I mean... wait, how...?" Gabriel stumbled over his own words as if they were coated in baby oil, and any attempt to grab back hold was forgotten when Aeris answered him anyway.  
  
"I know a lot of things about you, Mr. Lucia." Aeris said softly. "I know that you personally, deep down, are fully aware that you've spent more time out of the living world than you have in it, though some parts of you will not let you admit it to the other parts. Do you deny that you've felt incredibly out of place since you first awoke in Midgar?"  
  
Now Gabriel's tone was angry, if only because he was frustrated and because Aeris had just placed a finger directly on the point of unease he had been feeling for a while now. However, he chose to remain petulant over trying to mentally sort things out. "So I went out drinking. It isn't the first time I've waken up with a hangover and things look a little different. Or a lot different. Its what's known as the underaged alcoholic's time warp."  
  
"Mako Slingers," Aeris said calmly, refusing to rise up over the tone of Tiger's voice. "That is the bar you frequently visited, is it not?"  
  
Gabriel took a deep breath, but he didn't use it. Instead, he simply nodded. Aeris slowly walked up to him, and without knowing why, he rose to meet her.  
  
"Would you mind pulling aside your shirt for a moment?"  
  
In any other situation he would have had a dozen and a half witty retorts prepared for that one, but in this case he simply reached down, grabbed the bottom of his shirt, and pulled it up to his chin, with absolutely no idea what she was looking for. He felt her finger, surprisingly cold, press over the skin right above his heart.  
  
"White." She said simply.  
  
Gabriel blinked. "Yes, I am." He answered, not understanding. "So?"  
  
"No, that's not what I meant," Aeris dismissed his comment, "your skin is actually quite tan. But here its completely white. Almost bright in fact."  
  
Gabriel leaned forward a bit, struggling to cast his gaze downwards without having his balled up shirt blocking the way. What he saw was the underside crescent of a jagged circle, right under where Aeris had poled him. "So?" he repeated, "I have a lot of scars. There's one on my leg that looks like a dog for chrissake."  
  
"August 4th, you were drinking alone. While typical of you, that is not a wise thing to attempt to do in Midgar, and especially that particular bar. Roughly seventeen seconds before the stroke of midnight an exhausted man you thought was one of your few friends entered the room with a Cobra Colt .62, and immediately sprayed most of your chest onto the counter."  
  
"This is ridiculous!" A voice barked out, and Aeris jerked in surprise. Shed become so entrenched in her debate with Gabriel she didn't realize the strength of the spell had been slowly seeping away. The first man who had been able to break it was Tseng. "There is no reason to bicker over something that cant be proven one way or the other! Aeris. Why are we here?"  
  
Aeris gave Tseng a curious look for a moment, straightened her dress, and began to talk.  
  
***  
  
She talked for a long time, but no longer needed any sort of silencing spell to keep their attention. Rory and Gabriel, for example, barely dared to breath after a few minutes into the tale. Tension held high as she told them of Hojo, of the Planet, and of the destruction of Condor Tower. And in turn, they spoke too, though most of them had no idea at all why they were choosing to tell the stories they'd told or why the called up the memories that they did. It just came as natural, and when quiet contemplation finally began to settle in on the general crowd, there really was only one think left to say.  
  
"I notice," quipped Tseng, "you have yet to answer my question."  
  
"Isn't is obvious?" Cloud asked, hopping to his feet for no reason at all. "We need to destroy Hojo." The last few hours of talking, and of a teased battle that had not come to fruition, had filled him with a sort of manic zeal, and the urge to smite the nearest evil object was almost overwhelming. His very skin was bristling with barely pent up energy.  
  
Tseng smiles at the man, but there was nothing behind it. It was the sort of cold smirk he had given Shin Ra executives when they 'ordered' him to do something.  
  
"Sorry kid," he said coldly, "saving the Planet is your gig, not ours."  
  
Across the couch, leaning back against Reno's legs, Rory suddenly started in her relaxed pose. "But didn't you hear what she was just-"  
  
Risking the consequences, Reno promptly covered her mouth with his hand. He immediately received an indignant bite and an elbow in the shins, but when he let her go at the very least she was silent, seemingly getting the message that this was not a situation it would be smart to throw herself into the middle of.  
  
Cloud privately noted that at least the Turks were traveling with *one* decent person, but the angry look he had taken on upon hearing Tseng's words hadn't changed. "Tseng," he said through gritted teeth, "you don't like me, and your simple existence makes me question the plausibility of a higher power, but we wouldn't all be here if we weren't all needed. We *all* need to go to Hojo and handle this."  
  
With a sudden blink, Cloud became very unsure of himself. He turned to Aeris.  
  
"Right?" he asked.  
  
"Well... yes. And no," Aeris tacked on the last part quickly and cryptically, wiping the triumphant look off Cloud's face before it had even truly had time to form.  
  
"No?" Cloud asked, with confusion in his voice.  
  
"Yes?" Tseng demanded, with irritation in his.  
  
"You will all be needed, of course," Aeris tried to explain, "But there is some... equipment you need to pick up before you go to the Fort, and I'm afraid its quite scattered. You will all go off with your respective groups to retrieve them, more or less."  
  
"More or less?" Tseng asked, without a hint of give in his voice. "And what's with talking like we've already decided to go?"  
  
Aeris ignored the second part of his statement. "Yes, more or less. A few from each of you groups may be going off in smaller factions to gather these items as quickly as possible, but not even the Planet is optimistic enough to assume that all of you could travel any amount of distance together without mass bloodshed."  
  
Tseng glanced quickly at the other Turks. Their faces were impassive, just the was he'd hoped, and he made a mental note to commemorate it later. Even so, he knew what they were thinking, especially Reno. He'd just got his sister back, and the rest of them had just gotten each other back, and the kid... well, he probably had a family somewhere. How would they get anything out of any of this if the world ended before they got to enjoy it for once?  
  
He turned back to Aeris. "I have one condition," he said.  
  
"No." Aeris stated firmly, then instantly changed her tune. "Well, yes. What I mean is that I have nothing to hold over any of you, this is completely voluntary and thus you may set any conditions you wish. I just meant that if its about anyone staying behind, or only going halfway, or waiting a day to leave- forget it. Go home, enjoy your last days alone, because you are *all* necessary to this."  
  
Tseng paused, thinking over the condition he was ready to offer and realized it worked. He said it out loud, just so everyone would know. "Well go. Well do this. We might even refrain from killing any of Sliding Rocks over there. However, if we ever encounter a situation that there is no chance of walking away from- and the way you talk about whatever the hell Hojo has turned into, odds are well see a lot of these- we walk. We aren't matyrs, were mercenaries."  
  
Aeris misinterpreted his final sentence. "Well, I'm sure you'll find no shortage from parents of the children you'll save if you succeed in what you need to do." Without waiting for a response from Tseng that she knew wasn't coming, she turned to Cloud. "Can I count on you?"  
  
"Always." Cloud, as usual, spoke for the group, but even if he hadn't it would have been obvious what their answer was. They were simply an incredible union of heroism and unity.  
  
"So...." Reno said idly, "what sort of equipment?" 


	11. Splitting Paths

Rory sat alone in one of the rooms of the cottage, that seemed to have been custom built for her tastes. Nice and wide on either side, stretching room, space to breathe, there would be no claustrophobia here like you felt when you were trying to sleep in the back seat of a car. But the ceiling was low, so you knew it was there, so you had something to lock onto and grasp as you lay in bed with your thoughts swirling around you at a thousand miles an hour. So... her room was roomy, but not too roomy. Whatever that meant.  
  
A sharp tap came at her door, startling her out of her own thoughts. It had to be her brother, something about his knock always set itself apart as distinct. Loud as hell, even though he didn't really seem to hit the wood that hard, and not the firm smack of a teacher tapping your desk in school while you slept or the cops coming to do a raid in a house you were crashing in. Kind of like her room. You knew it was there, but it wasn't intrusive.  
  
Which was actually quite unlike her brother, who was both of them.  
  
She didn't tell him to come in. There wasn't really a need to. At their old house they hadn't exactly had doors, so a knock was just a five second indication to hide whatever bad thing she was doing so he wouldn't have to yell at her for it. If she wasn't quick enough, well, she deserved the lecture then. It would speed her up. On pure instinct, she allowed her eyes to scan the room, making sure a stolen razor or a pile of pills or something wasn't lying around in plain sight. Five seconds past, and the door creaked open, though even she had to admit Reno came in a lot slower than he used to.  
  
"Hey kid," he said slowly, taking a seat next to her on the bed. Finally in a good light, Rory began to realize how truly tired Reno looked. And how old.  
  
"Since when did you call me kid?" She slung the barb at him, hoping he would remember the old tradition of exchanging jibes. It was one of the only ways they could have a conversation.  
  
"Since I got about twenty years older than you," Reno answered, taking her question at face value as he ran his hand back through his hair. Rory was horrified to catch the beginning sprouts of a few premature greys, an obvious by product of stress.  
  
"Ah." Was all she could think of to say, and then hastily rearranged her position on the bed so she sat facing him. "Well then, Mr. responsible adult, can you tell me why you almost sucker punched the chick in the pink?"  
  
Reno winced at the very recent memory. As almost all things that involved anyone on God's green earth being anything but prostrated towards Aeris, Cloud had got into a big thing about wanting to cut his head off with a sword. It wasn't like he'd done anything that over the top, and insults shouldn't count as anything anyway. After all, she *was* a stupid bitch, he didn't care what anyone said. "I just don't feel right about you going off with that Gabriel guy alone. I just found you again, I'm not in a big hurry to have to bury you a second time."  
  
"I don't know," Rory said quickly, trying to get the image of being buried out of her mind as fast as she could. "Aeris said he was... what? Training for your job before he got shot? Training as a Turk?"  
  
"That doesn't exactly make me feel better," Reno said slowly, "though I am glad he didn't actually get the job. Of course, that *is* why he most likely got shot."  
  
"Huh?" Rory asked, interested in a morbid sort of way.  
  
"Old custom," Reno said simply, "that was disbanded before I joined up with them. The Turks had no connection to any larger company then, and you didn't give them a resume, they came to you. Of course, some times they come to you anyway, but that's besides the point..." Reno suddenly sighed in frustration. This wasn't really the topic he wanted to be discussing, it sounded like a really horrible movie. My Life as an Assassin. My Life as a Murderer. I've Killed Children. Ugh.  
  
"They'd round up some of the biggest known gang members, train them up for about a month or two. Then, that night, they'd go to all of them- tell them that they'd won. But it wasn't that simple, the price of initiation was taking out every other candidate for the title before the strike of midnight. So they started their own little last man standing, and whoever came back still breathing and in control of most major limbs got the job. I'm guessing Gabriel forgot to knock someone off, and they got to him first."  
  
Rory stared at him in disgust. "So he would have what, been your teacher, if he'd gotten in?"  
  
Reno smiled at the bizarre thought of a fifteen year old picking him up off the streets and trying to teach him the tricks of being a Turk. "Maybe, maybe not," he said with a small grin, "or maybe Tseng's. I didn't really catch how old he'd be today if he had been smart enough to wear a bullet proof vest. Actually, he probably would have been Tseng's, and that's why my boss always gets a really weird look on his face when he sees him. I unno."  
  
There was a pause, which Reno used to figure out how thoroughly Rory had managed to lead him off subject.  
  
"But still. I don't like the thought of you going trekking with him."  
  
"Were going over some snow to pick up a few things to stab people with. I think your being a tad over protective. I should be the one worried your going to give me a little niece or nephew, going out with that Wutain girl." Rory jabbed again, hoping he'd rise to the challenge. This time, he did.  
  
"Listen, Aurora," he said slowly, trying to build before the shot, "just because you little whippersnappers can hear us wise folk, that doesn't mean you understand what we really mean." He gave her his best impression of a withered old man, like on of the few drunks on the streets who had made it to old age. They both managed to keep a straight face for roughly the time it took for them to replay what he had said in their minds, and then they both broke out laughing.  
  
"Its going to be weird getting used to you being old enough to be my dad," Rory admitted, "not like you don't act like it anyway. So what else is new? Wait, let me guess. You're a rich pimp who only whores out the prissy little bimbo girls who made fun of you twenty years ago?"  
  
A flicker of a frown crossed Reno's face, and Rory wasn't exactly sure what she had said wrong. Maybe she had just triggered an unhappy memory in her older- now by a considerable deal- brothers mind. She quickly scooted across the bed and put her hand on her arm, trying despite herself to be serious. It was just pretty damn hard to try to act grim when she was in the warmest, safest place that shed probably been in her entire life, or at least since she left the womb. And with stray bullets, abusive husbands, thrown bottles... no, this *was* the safest place she had ever been.  
  
"Hey," she said reassuringly, "Ill be fine. And I was just kidding about the Wutain girl, she's too short for you anyway. The blonde one. She's nice. You should try to hook up with the blonde one."  
  
Reno snorted. "Elena? She's ditzy, she hates smoking, and she belongs to Tseng." Reno paused in mid speech. "And I mean that literally. I'm not sure he wants her, but the little girl Elena that I know will always belong to Tseng. Without him, she's just..."  
  
Me, his mind told him.  
  
"Cold." Is what he said out loud.  
  
An awkward silence followed, as Rory tried to envision the skilled but off beat women as an assassin. It didn't work. In an effort to calm the silence, Reno hastily reached into his jacket, and pulled out a long black handle.  
  
"Here," he said, sounding awkward. "This is for you. To take with you. As far as I know you aren't going to run into anything unpleasant, but if you do, this should help a little."  
  
He went to hand it to her, making an obvious effort to turn it sideways as he did. Rory had no idea until she grabbed it and went to pull it back with a quick squeeze, and six inches of thin steel popped out of the end facing away from that. Had Reno not turned it, it would have ended up in her palm.   
  
"Wow," she said simply.  
  
"Wow is right." Reno said. "That should never come out of your pack, understand? Ever. I mean it. Its meant for self defense, but even if a self defense situation arises, I don't want to know about it. You can do it, and you can use it, but I don't want to know about it. You understand me?"  
  
Rory nodded, staring at the handle closely. It had been engraved with something, not carved into but around, so the image actually rose up from the handle. A long stemmed rose curled around it, long thorns jutting out on either side, dripping blood. The blossom of the flower spread out into the opening where the blade would emerge. At the very bottom, one word was written:  
  
Rory.  
  
She looked slowly back up at Reno. "How long have you had this?" she asked.  
  
"Bought it with my first pay check as a Turk," Reno said. "I didn't have a good knife, Tseng said I needed one, and since anyone who didn't have their own knife wasn't someone Shin Ra would ever hire any way, I had to buy it myself. I figured Id spring the few extra bucks."  
  
Twisting her fingers sharply, Rory withdrew the blade back into the knife. Reno looked at her in shock, but amusement was obvious in the rims of his eyes. "And where did you learn to that?" he asked.  
  
"Practiced with your old one whenever you forgot it back at the house and left. It was no where near as cool as this one though. Thank you."  
  
Reno smiled, but it was bitter. 'Thank you' were not words he got to hear very much when they were younger... well, when he was younger. He hadn't been able to give Rory very much to be thankful for. If they got through this deal with Hojo, he was going to start changing that immediately. Pony. A pony. He was going to buy her a by god pony, first thing. And ice cream. Lots of it.  
  
"Sure thing, kid," he said. "You know, this is going to be quite a hike. The old chain smoker will be able to drop us all off close enough to where we need to go in a big blimp with rockets on it- and yes, the ride is just as fun as it sounds. I hurl everywhere, and if you're any blood relative of mine, you will to. But that's not the problem. The walk back is. All the way from the Icicle Inn mountains to Condor Towers? Its not exactly like we got a lot of moving excersise back home except when we were running from gun fire."  
  
Rory smiled a wicked looking grin. "Well make it a race. After all, from that map Aeris showed us, all Gabriel and I need to do is cross a damn river. You guys are going to a whole other continent. I say the first people who make it there owes everyone else a round of beers."  
  
Reno shot her a sharp look.  
  
"...root beer for me." She allowed.  
  
"I don't think were going to be in a drinking mood," Reno said slowly, trying to convince himself that such a mood actually exists. "Besides, your trying to trick me into a suckers bet. The Ava-brats and us Turks are crossing the damned ocean, and they're the only ones keeping the Highwind. Thus, you're dealing with a bunch of incompetents with a plane and a bunch of brilliant minds without one."  
  
Rory laughed. "You're no fun anymore."  
  
"I was never fun," Reno assured her, "and to prove it, I'm going to say something I've never actually said before. Go to bed. Tomorrow is a big day, and you have a hell of a lot of walking to do. Keep in mind Ill probably be going ballistic every ten seconds I think of you trudging through snow with that sawed off little smart ass, so try to hurry, will ya?"  
  
Rory nodded smartly. Of course she would take exactly as long as she god damn well pleased, but there was no reason to speak that thought out loud- Reno had to know it anyway. He was just fulfilling this very unfitting parental role by trying to act like he could constrict her actions. If she wanted to hurry, she would hurry. If she wanted to rest a day for some hot chocolate and some skiing, she would do that to. Its not exactly like she was in a hurry to meet some mad scientist gone even worse.  
  
Without another word, Reno left her there, images of soaring down an ice covered mountain at death defying speeds on a pair of wooden stakes with flimsy metal rods to steer with flying through her head. It didn't take her very long to decide that no, she would not be going skiing. Maybe she would hurry, after all.  
  
Then, to her complete and utter surprise, she rolled under the covers of her bed, and went to sleep.  
  
***  
  
"How did they take it?" Rufus sounded less interested than awkward, as if the nine seconds of silence since Aeris had made her way into the room shed stowed them in had been unbearable. He leaned back against a rigid wooden chair, slowly cleaning the new 12 gauge Aeris must have picked up somewhere or other. It was heavier than his old gun, and he was sure it had a lot less accuracy and power, but that's the kind of thing you needed to deal with when you bought trash from civilians. Even his new jacket felt disturbingly scratchy...  
  
"They took it." Aeris answered simply and cryptically. "That's all I could really ask for. Of course, if things had started to go too badly, I probably could have marched the two of you out there to cause quite a stir."  
  
"No doubt..." Zack glanced down the edge of his buster sword to make sure it was straight, and quickly plucked a bloody hair from the tip. It was going to take forever to get his weapon clean of those damned rats. If not longer.   
  
"Listen, there is something I've... heard, just recently, that I didn't get to tell you before I had to talk to them." Aeris fumbled over her words, not sure how to tell them shed gotten this new information without revealing that she hadn't been sent back to the Planet alone. Somehow, the thought of informing them the man who had tried to kill both of them was in this very house wasn't all that appealing.  
  
Rufus glanced up from his weapon, his attention caught. He didn't like it when other people knew more than him. "Well?" he said impatiently, though she wouldn't have had time to tell them yet if shed wanted to.  
  
"Its a side trip." She said. "That everyone needs to take. Different side trips. Your two side trip happens to fit together, so you'll be traveling side by side once again."  
  
The two men, president and soldier, shot each other an emotionless glance, and then looked back at Aeris. Neither of them objected.   
  
"Yours is actually the oddest of the lot," Aeris admitted, "and I'm not really sure how it came to be. Rufus, do you remember your underwater reactor?"  
  
Rufus paused. "In Junon, yes. Why, are we going there?"  
  
"Excuse me," Zack interrupted, "did you say underwater?"  
  
Aeris seemed to pay him no heed. "Actually, no. You're going to be going under it."  
  
"What?" Rufus demanded. "There is no 'under it'. 'Under it' is very wet sand and some sea shells, unless you get really deep and then you would probably start running into rock, slate, molten lava, and if you went even deeper than that, you would probably poke your head up into Wutain air."   
"Uh, guys..." Zack tried again.  
  
"Hojo secretly issued an order to the soldiers there to start mining downwards in your name. It was slow work, they only got a few hundred feet down in a years time, and its not very wide, but they got close to what they were looking for. Only a few more feet of sand and they would have found them."  
  
"Found *what*!?" Rufus asked sharply, agitated how Hojo had been operating so many things without permission. He really should have kept that man on a shorter leash while he was still a man.  
  
"Weapons," Aeris said simply.  
  
Rufus froze. Images of the Diamond Weapon approaching the cannon in Junon, of the gunfire and rockets bouncing uselessly off its hide as it advanced, only to charge up its weapon and fire a direct hit into the room where Rufus stood. "I've had quite enough dealings with Weapons on my life time, thank you very much." He told her coldly.   
  
Aeris understood at once, and was apologetic. "No, no, I mean real weapons, though I am not sure what kind. They are sort of similar, though, they are from the planet, and I believe they are incredibly powerful. But you would be wielding them, not attacked by them."  
  
"GUYS!" Zack suddenly barked out, interrupting the two of them and causing them to look over in shock.  
  
"What!?" Rufus barked back, but Aeris simply responded with a simple nod, indicating he should say his piece.  
  
"I am not going under water." Zack said firmly.  
  
"Excuse me?" Rufus asked.  
  
"I'm not." Zack repeated. "Going under water. I don't do that. I don't swim. I don't go in boats. I don't do water, period."  
  
Aeris pleaded quickly, "Zack, you need to understand..."  
  
"No!" He argued, not letting her finish. "Look, I know how important this is, and I have a vague idea of what's at stake with all the traveling I did in Soldier. But I would be useless under water, Rufus would probably be better off going alone."  
  
"Would it help if I told you that the tunnel you would be traveling down in is pitch black, so there's no way there would be enough light for you to even see that you were under water?" Aeris offered weakly.  
  
"No," Zack answered stiffly, "I'm not sure that would help me at all."  
  
"...I knew it." Rufus' voice, sounding odd, came from their left. Aeris reverted her attention to him.  
  
"Knew what?" She asked.  
  
"That Soldiers were soft," Rufus said simply.  
  
"Rufus!" Aeris said in shock.  
  
"What?" he asked. "There was a reason Avalanche was able to bust into our operations over and over again. Because the Soldiers weren't fast enough to get there, and wouldn't have been strong enough to stop them if we had. Cowards. Look at Zack here, he's afraid of a little water."  
  
The Gonganan began to rise angrily, growling, "You son of a..."  
  
Rufus continued unabated. "It makes me wonder how people like Cloud managed to wash out without major genetic defects. It seems like the club was less exclusive than a local swimming pool..."  
  
Rufus shot Zack a quick look.  
  
"I apologize if that gave you the willies. Mentioning the pool, I mean."  
  
Zacks mouth worked angrily and soundlessly for a moment, his knuckles white on the grip of his sword. He looked like he would have preferred very much to shiska bob the man right then and there, but something held him back. The desire to prove him wrong. He turned to Aeris.  
  
"I'm going," he said simply, and promptly exited into the second room she had given them to sleep in, managing not to slam the door loudly enough that it would invite investigation from other resides in the house. Aeris gave Rufus a long, hard look.  
  
"Could you please tell me," she asked slowly, "why you did that?"  
  
Rufus' face remained absolutely cold for a moment, and then suddenly broke, and an arrogant smirk spread across his features, though Aeris was unsure whether or not that was just a mask for his smile. "It worked, didn't it?" He gave as his explanation. "I think getting this done is more important than having friends, is it not?"  
  
After a moment of shaking her head, Aeris, too left, leaving Rufus alone in the room. He paused, and then resumed cleaning his gun.  
  
"Some people are so sensitive..." he muttered under his breath. 


	12. No Joking Matter

Even in sickness, they avoided each other.  
  
There was limited space that was offered for a motion sickness afflicted soul to utilize to empty the contents of their stomach over, and somehow Reno and Yuffie had managed to put every inch of it between the two them. It would be quite an image if anyone could deal with the gore that went with it, two deadly killers, one for hire, one for honor, on their knees gagging a few thousand feet in the air while at the same time not allowing themselves to heave one foot to the right, or left, respectively.  
  
It had been rumored for a long time that tranguilizers would cure the sickness, but it was simply a new age version of an old wives tale. The mind altering chemicals in the vial could only numb the afflicted temporarily to any sensation at all, which is a horrible idea if you still want to make it to an open area and not make a mess on the floor around you. Even though both of them knew this, they both would have injected at least a half dozen into their veins if Cid had allowed any to be taken aboard the Highwind. Apparently he thought there was something 'dangerous' about chemical that dulled reaction time aboard an airfract. Weird.  
  
Dully, Reno managed to realize that the scenery below had changed, and in fact had been different for some time. Instead of the brown rock of Midgar or the lush green instantly surrounding it, there was white absolutely everywhere, expanding in every direction as far as the eye could see. In the distance, but not too far, were the snow capped mountains they were heading towards, where his sister and her 'partner' would be dropped off at, a fact that Reno was still not fully done opposing. It was just hard to argue when your opponent had the 'saving the world' card to play whenever they wanted, over and over again. The only card he had was 'indignant brother', which was out ranked just a tad.  
  
Forty agonizing minutes later, travelling at speeds that are unaccesible by almost all of the vehicles in existence, they reached their destination, and the huge, jarring stop that even the best technology in the world couldnt prevent caused Reno to retch a final time, before falling straight backwards, and losing his grip on the metal railing, slammed hard against the wooden planks that made up the deck. He lay there for a moment, in absolute bliss over the lack of movement, and then opened his eyes.  
  
Standing above him, a taunting smile on her lips, was his little sister. A little back and to the left was Gabriel, who was making a few useless attempts to talk to Yuffie, who was in no mood to communicate with any other person on the Planet at that point. Reno checked his sisters eyes, which were bright and clear, and skin, which was as pale as usual but had no green tint, and growled at her. "Please dont tell me you werent affected at all," he moaned.  
  
Rory laughed, very much so at his expense. "Oh get up you big baby," she snickered, "it like riding a bike."  
  
Reno blinked, staring up at her. "Have you ever ridden a bike?" he asked, causing Rory to pause.  
  
"As a matter of fact, no," she said, "and it barely feels like I rode this thing. Now get up."  
  
Slowly, wincing at the creaking sound his joints made- wasnt that supposed to hold off until you were at least thirty? There was a momentary flash when Reno remembered that he was thirty two, and he probably would have screamed if Rory hadnt been there- Reno pushed himself to his feet, and hugged his sister. While he had her tight in the embrace, he made a point of burrowing his head low, and whispered directly at her ear lobe, "Remember the knife?"  
  
He didnt see, but felt, her head nodding. "Good," he whispered, "if alley boy over there tries something, I want you to bury it in his thigh."  
  
Rory laughed and pushed away from him, but it was a happy push. Theyd never been able to have real jokes in Midgar, nothing was ever that funny in the ever looming shadow of the valley of death that was the slums. Now, where the sky could be seen and you could walk alone for five minutes, everything just seemed a lot easier to laugh at. "Not everyone thinks like you," she laughed.  
  
Trying to fake an innocent expression, Reno spread his arms. "Oh come on!" he protested, "who did you ever see me try to score with back in Midgar?"  
  
"No one," Rory admitted, elicting a triumphant grin from her brother, which she quickly smeared from his face. "But Ive been talking with Elena on the way here, down with the people whos stomachs dont turn into lidless blenders when theyre in the air."  
  
Reno froze. "Oh," he offered lamely, and then knowing he was beaten submitted. "All right, all right, its clear years of not practicing has slowed my mind. When I see you at Condor Valley I promise Ill be better at it. Now go on, my smart ass little duckling, I think its time for you to start your hike."  
  
Rory nodded, looked over her shoulder for her trip companion, and saw that Gabriel was already making his way down the long rope ladder that led to the frozen ground from the deck. Giving her brother a quick peck on the stubbled cheek, she hurried after him, pausing only once to check the pocket of the large coat Aeris had given her to make sure the gifted knife was still safe and sound. It was, and she went, waving both to Reno and to the pained looking lump on the floor that was Yuffie Kisargi.  
  
Cid wasted no time in starting up the Highwind once the two of them had got clear, and Reno watched with a little sadness and a lot of mounting nausea as the two teenagers shrunk below, then were reduced to specks, and then dissapeared as the group continued on their path. It was to Wutai next, where- if it wasnt for Yuffie's inexplicable popularity with the native people and her knowledge of the immeadite land- her and the Turks would be parting ways to go and find their respective pieces of the Legacy on their own.  
  
Reno, in particular, was hoping for such a split to still take place. He had a few contacts he needed to visit in that area, he hadnt been in touch with them for far to long, but they werent the type who were likely to come out of the shadows if he had the daughter of the ruler of the city- and the maker of its laws- hanging around him like some sort of over affectionate, but extremely bitchy, cat.  
  
To try to fend off the wave of illness, Reno looked to his right, where Yuffie was already looking ready to retch. He made a face at her, unsure of why, instincts of child hood twisting his face into a leering mask automatically. She went to respond, trying to cross her eyes at him, but the combination of distorted visions and high speed only made her illness worse, and she instantly dove at the railing so hard she almost flipped over it and began to gag.  
  
Slowly, Reno leaned back against the wall, and allowed himself to slide into a sitting position. Then again, he thought, she might be good for a laugh.  
  
***  
  
For a long time, neither of them said anything. Rory and Gabriel marched, resolutely, side by side towards the first rising of the towering peak they would need to enter. It wasnt exactly like they needed a map, or to discuss direction- they had been told to get into the mountain, whatever the hell that meant, and look around. Both of them were tense beyond believe, feeling a sort of unbearable tension to suceed, to fulfill, to cast off the doubts of the others who hadnt thought them capable to go out together.  
  
"...its fucking cold." Gabriel muttered, under his breath.  
  
"Yes." Rory punctuated his thought, watching without much interest the white puffs issuing from her mouth and then dissipating into the air. "Yes it is."  
  
"Think we'll find these things tonight?" Gabriel asked with a shiver, as his leg sunk a little deeper in the snow than hed hoped and some snow made its way over the tip of his boot.  
  
Rory paused. It honestly hadnt occured to her about what they were going to do if they didnt. It wasnt exactly like snow made the best bed in the world, and even though shed slept in worse, she wasnt looking forward to waking up in below freezing temperatures, winter suits from a Cetra or otherwise. "Let's hope so," she shrugged, "or lets hope we find a hot spring."  
  
With a shrug, Gabriel trudged on, and she followed closely behind. She'd mistook his meaning. The cold didnt bother him at all, it was heat that bugged him, hed much rather see his breath than be running with sweat. Its why he couldnt have been happier when Aeris had told them to come up into the land of snow and ice, even though he didnt believe for half a god damned second they would actually find something- especially not tonight. The mountain seemed to be at least an hours walk away, and after that- its a mountain! You dont go inside mountains, you go over them! You can go inside volcanoes, of course, but you often wish you didnt.  
  
They walked on for about twenty minutes or so, noticing with growing concern that the snow seemed to be getting deeper as they moved on. It didnt make any sense, as there was no reason for it to have no blown level across the ground, but there was no mistaking the soggy feeling off chilled snow packed higher and higher around their legs. Then, in one moment, Gabriel sunk deeper than ever before.  
  
"Knock knock," Rory said suddenly, coming up with the segway out of the blue. Gabriel glanced over in surprise.  
  
"What?" he said.  
  
"Knock knock," Rory repeated patiently.  
  
Gabriel looked around. "Am I supposed to see a door?" he asked with a small grin.  
  
"Very funny." Rory growled. "Knock. Knock."  
  
"What do you want from me here?" Gabriel asked, still smiling, but genuinely confused where she was trying to go with this.  
  
"Youre supposed to say 'whos there', idiot." Rory snapped at him. "Dont tell me youve never heard one of these jokes before."  
  
Gabriels smile faded away. "I dont know many jokes, actually, he admitted.  
  
"Oh," fumbled Rory, taken aback. "Well... then we can start now. Knock knock."  
  
"Hm." Gabriel paused, hoping to milk her irritation. "Well, whos-"  
  
Gabriel's response was cut off by a sudden gasp of surprise as he felt his feet go out from under him, and suddenly his ankles were somewhere above his head, and his head was plummeting through hard packed snow, and he was falling. It wasnt a long drop, but it felt like it, and there was a loud thud as he bounced on the solid bottom to the hole hed slipped into, punching through the thin layer of ice that had acted as a roof. Rory instantly appeared at the corner of the hole, a horrified look on her face, staring down at Gabriel as if he were dead.  
  
"Gabriel!?" she screamed down, though if he were consious he would have heard her anyway, and if he was unconsious it wouldnt have mattered. He was consious.  
  
"Who's there?" he groaned in pain, trying to bring a smile to his own lips, but a sudden pain jarred through his ribs when he spoke. Broken, he guessed, or at the very least bruised. They hadnt even found that Hojo guy and he was already kicking his own ass. Skills.   
  
"Are you OK?" came the concerned, if not all together intelligent response. "Can you stand?"  
  
The second part had proved to be a lot smarter than the first, and Gabriel quickly tested himself. His legs seemed to be fine, and he managed to lift himself slowly, but that didnt stop a wave of despair from suddenly washing over him. "Ah.... fuck." he moaned.  
  
"What?" came Rory's voice again, "What's wrong?"  
  
For a moment, Gabriel didnt respond, allowing her own words to sink in. After a few seconds, she continued.  
  
"I mean, besides the obvious."  
  
"I don't think I can get out of here," he answered her, "I dont jump eight feet and I cant climb snow, Id just sink deeper! Do we have any rope?"  
  
"No..." Rory asked, biting her bottom lip. All she had that Gabriel didnt was her knife, and that wouldnt help them in this situation. "I..." something caught the corner of her eye. "I..." she half turned to get a better look, and promptly screamed.  
  
"You WHAT!?" Gabriel cried fromt he bottom of the hole, craning his neck to try to see what was going on. All he saw was Rory slowly backing around the circle, a look of terror on her face. And then, he didnt see it, but heard it instead. A growl raspy and deep, the growl of something not altogether big, but dangerous. He didnt need to see it to realize what it was, and to realize that there was no way in hell there wasnt more of them. A sudden flash of gray fur over the edge confirmed his fears.  
  
Wolves.  
  
"Rory!" he screamed, not so much a warning as trying to get her attention.  
  
"W-what?" she asked, amazingly calm, as she continued to walk with short, unsteady steps, away from the wolf.   
  
"Run!" He yelled up simply.  
  
He knew there was no way that she didnt already know that running was the best chance she had. It was natural human instinct in situations of high danger to simply turn tail and flee. Why she needed to actually hear the word spoken by another human being to put it into action Gabriel would never know, but he did know that Rory instantly took off like a bolt and dissapeared from his sight, and the sound of feet pounding snow was everywhere.  
  
Rory was small, and Rory was fast, but Rory was on the wolves turf, and even if they had been on the hard concrete streets of Midgar- well, no one out runs the loping wolf. She knew as well as they did, slavering with hungry anticipation, that she could not simply sprint away from them. So it was either incredible luck, which didnt run in her blood, or incredible fate when the large out cropping of rocks ahead turned out to be closer than it appeared, and rapidly grew in her vision. Her feet pounded hard against the ground as two grey Timberwolves matched her stride and snapped at her heels, and with a final, diving leap, she rolled under one of the rocks and to- hopefully- protection.  
  
She looked around quickly from the inside, realizing she had probably found the best shelter possible in the entire continent. The only entrance was the small crack she had just dove through, and beyond that, seemed to just be a tunnel of rocks. She backed up quickly from the opening, as if expecting one of the obviously too large wolves to simply crush through the rock at any moment, but was greeted only with silence. After a nervous minute, she crouched down, bare hands pressing against the snow, and peered through the crack.  
  
There was a sudden, violent snap, so close to her nose she felt the breeze brush her face, and with a suprised scream she lurched backwards, out of the range of the chomping jaws. The wolves circled the outcropping for a few minutes, and then reluctantly retreated, growling deep in their throats. For a moment, the danger was over, and Rory allowed herself a deep breath, a shuddering gasp that she inhaled into her body. It was only then she remembered her knife, and wondered if she could have done anything with it.  
  
A hundred feet away, the scene was playing very different in Gabriel's mind. The last he had seen of Rory and the wolves was a frantic flight, and the last hed heard was a loud scream and beastial snarls. Panic struck him like a fist, and instead of trying to crush it he welcomed it instead, allowing it to flow down through his veins and into the pit of his stomach.  
  
Which will it be this time, he wondered painfully, as he felt his skin begin to stretch. We just did the armor, so what are we doing now?  
  
His question didnt take long for an answer, as this change was perhaps the subtlest he ever went through. Aside from the natural expanding of muscles, his skin faded to a dull white, almost to match the snow on which he stood. Recognizing with sudden regret what was happening, he pulled back his jaw and lower lip, as a pair of thin, spiky canines replaced his short and blunt ones, jutting down a good inch out of his mouth. Hastily he adjusted and snapped his mouth shut with a sudden close of his eyes.  
  
When he opened them, they were red.  
  
There are some very specific instincts that go with the change he simply called the Hunter. Very specific urges. Feelings. Hunger, cold, aggression... and cold, utterly logical calculations. Of course, it wasnt all detrimental. It also packed one hell of a lot of muscle mass.  
  
Enough, say, to leap the necessary extra distance to grasp the rim of the hole in pale hands, and haul himself up over the edge. At this point, there wasnt very much left that he could do to control the drives of the Hunter, but all of those drives served his immeadiate purpose in mind. Find the wolves. Kill the wolves. The only restraint he would need was to convince the Hunter not to rip apart any small red heads he happened to come across. Hunting legs moved faster than wolf paws, and the Hunter cleared the distance in half the time it had taken the hunting pack. It came across them as they backed away from a large rock, and even though the small corner of reality based sanity in the corner of its skull realized something was odd, the Hunter couldnt have cared less.   
  
Two wolves leapt at it to intercept its obvious charge, but it only struck once to retaliate. A large, sweeping backhand, and sickening crack was heard when it connected with gray fur. The impact traveled through the first wolf, and while not enough to break the seconds ribs as it had its predecessor, it was more than enough to send it sprawling, stunned and disoriented. The Hunter wasted no time in falling upon it at once, grasping both its fists together in a hammer blow and slamming it down upon the sprawling creatures neck, snapping it like tinder.   
  
It took only those few seconds of violence for the other three wolves in the pack to get the point, and the Alpha male was the first to lead the charge in the opposite direction. Here, rational Gabriel tried to reach through the blood lust of his transformation and grab the reigns, but he was brushed aside like a bothersome fly. Crouching down like a true beast of attack, the Hunter charged after its retreating victims, snarling fangs bared like a knife.  
  
The business was quick but messy, and only when the last twitching fur had stilled did the Hunter manage to calm itself, and Gabriel managed to force his way through the aggression. The switch back was slower than the switch towards, which is the way with most things, but gradually the pale skin tanned, the fangs receded, and the bulging muscles were reduced to simply strapped ones. When it was over, Gabriel stood panting like a dog, the exertion the Hunter had been able to ignore striking him all at once like a sledge hammer blow. To his disgust, there was clumps of dark gray fur caught under his nails, and the entire left side of his face was stained with a spray of blood.  
  
"That... was unpleasant." Gabriel tried to spit once, making sure nothing has been left behind in his mouth. He ran his tongue experimentally over his upper teeth, and finding them straight, heaved a sigh of relief. It was impossible to leave the fear that one of these times, he simply wouldnt have the energy left to switch back.  
  
"What... the hell... are you?" A voice came from behind him, loud but quavering. Gabriel turned quickly, shocked, his hand insticvely and futiley trying to wipe the blood from his cheek. Rory stood behind him, knees stained from the ground shed crept on, eyes wide in shock.  
  
****  
  
"So... how long have you been able to do this?"  
  
The two were huddled around a fire that Rory had hastily made inside the stone enclosure, and it wasnt lost on Gabriel that she sat on the exact opposite side of the low, flickering flames than him. It had taken him more than a while to calm her, and even longer than that to convince her to let him explain. The dimplomacy process had been deterred by the short switch blade she refused to stop pointing at his shoulder all the time he tried to talk.  
  
"Long enough," Gabriel muttered, his eyes locked on the new fallen snow. For some reason, he was never good at meeting the eyes of people who had seen him in changed form, and Rory in particulars gaze just seemed way too condemning. "First time was when I was about twelve and some drunk with a shotgun started shooting at us. Took me about five minutes to realize that when the stray pellets hit me, they were bouncing off. Got curious, found a mirror, passed out."  
  
Rory laughed, despite herself. Seeing the average form of Gabriel, hunched over the fire, seeming to shrink in upon himself in a sort of quiet depression, made it all the more bizarre to imagine the streak of white hed seemed on the already pale snow, before the sudden addition of spilling, steaming red.   
  
They sat in silence for a while, moving once in a while to warm their hands with the fire, though it was more for show than anything. The clothes and gloves- Rory had retrieved hers, having fallen off as she ran- were unnaturally warm, and the rocks provided about as good protection from the enviroment as could be hoped. Gabriel spent the majority of the silence simply watching the flames flicker, reflected in his brooding eyes.   
  
"I think I'm supposed to love you," he said, breaking the silence with a shrug.  
  
Rory did a double take. And then a third. "Excuse me?" she asked, with due interest.  
  
"We woke up together under explicable and slightly romantic circumstances. We went through some weird shit together. We happen to be the same age, and reasonably attractive on both parts, the average brought down by myself, Im afraid. And now were sitting around a fire," he finished with a flourish, "seems like the perfect bullshit movie scenario for a teen sex film."  
  
"Oh..." Rory paused simply, feeling considerable relief that he was just babbling after all. "Well. Do you?"  
  
"Nah," he said simply. "Sorry."  
  
"No apologies necessary." She answered easily, and then looked down the narrow tunnel to her left and Gabriel's right, where it yawned at them like a tired snake. "I think we should go through that tommorow," she suggested.  
  
Tommorow seemed to have already entered Gabriel's mind, for as the time passed he had slowly slid, budged, and repositioned himself into a fetal position near the fire. He barely seemed awake as it was, and had been speaking with a rather distant voice for some time. "How comes?" he asked with a yawn.  
  
"Well, we need to get inside the mountain. As far as I can tell, this is as good a way as any," she explained, "unless it just runs into a suffocating and ultimately deadly sudden stop, at which point we're screwed."  
  
"Mm." Gabriel said, drifting off even as he spoke. "Or a bear cave."  
  
And with that, he was asleep, and after a few minutes of watching the fire, Rory curled up and followed suit. 


	13. Rock On

[Note to Reviewer: Woah, woah, Tinis gonna kill me. Lol... actually, she wrote the story you were thinking of and is the creator of Aurora. Im just her groupie. Er. Lackey.]  
  
The heavy, unstable steps off the lowered plank of the Highwind probably would have been the most enjoyable and welcome of Reno's life had it not been for the brunette who literally bounded past him, shoving him out of the way and taking a cute little ninja somersault onto the grass, where she preceded to press against it lovingly. "Ground," Yuffie crowed, nearly orgasmically, "real touchable thanks be to God not moving land. I would fuck it if it had a dick."  
  
Reno's eyes strayed to the left, where a particularly long rock happened to be jutting up from a collection of grass, but decided to keep his mouth shut. Whether this had to do with post flying nausea or the desire not to further imagine Miss. Kisargi bouncing on a piece of rock like a whore house employee, he decided not to debate with himself. Instead, he stepped happily onto land, and turned to await the descenst of the three people he hoped would be able to keep him sane on this trip, Rude, Tseng, and God help him- even Elena.  
  
"So, Kisargi," Tseng spoke with the voice of a true professional, finally off the shaky legs that his temporary skit with death had given him and back in full on business mode. "I believe that Aeris said you would know where to find these weapons?"  
  
Sometimes Reno wondered if his mentor truly was made of ice, but it didn't seem probable. Ice was so slippery, and so changeable, all it took was a little bit of heat or pressure either way and it would break or fade away. But still cold... dry ice, that was it. Untouchable, so you couldn't change it, and if you tried, you'd have a hell of time pulling it away when it fused to your skin and held the fuck on.  
  
"I only know of one place on this continent I haven't been," Yuffie said without a hint of modesty, "and that's because its sacred. If you think were going there, you're crazy."  
  
"Why?" Reno sneered, unable to hide his disgust for all things religious. Superstitious idiots was definitely one of his red buttons. "Because if we do some big fish will dig its way through the rock and spit water at us?"  
  
"No," Yuffie asked, the girlish hint leaving her voice and being replaced by cold steel, "because Its my personal responsibility to kill anyone who dares soil holy land. That means you, carrot top."  
  
Not really concerned with her words or her threats either way- Reno had received much worse and they all damn well knew it- the Turk was in the mood for a bit of entertainment. He cocked an eyebrow, and posed with his hands on his hips in a way he had seen Yuffie herself do more than once when he was feeling stubborn. "Oh come now," he said coyly, but his voice was laced with venomous barbs, "you'd honestly spill blood of someone as useful and entertaining to have around as myself before he left a foot print or two on grass that's probably only called sacred because it has exactly what we came to find, now would you?"  
  
Yuffie was having none of his games. "Listen you son of a-"  
  
Having baby sat more frequently then he liked to count through his life, be it child, or merely adults acting as children, Tseng cut in before this could escalate to something truly annoying and time wasting. "Listen!" he said sharply. "I was born here, and I know where Yuffie is talking about. I also know you can get a very good view of the land itself without actually standing on it. Thus, we are going to go look, and if we see anything that could be these Legacy weapons, we go and get them, gods be damned.  
  
"But-" Reno and Yuffie started at the same time, though they each had very different places they intended to finish.  
  
"-understand?" Tseng didn't allow them the courtesy of completing their thoughts. Both of them stared at him with unconcealed frustration, but they nodded. Just like dealing with five year olds, Tseng thought, and stepped back. The Highwind was taking off, and there was no reason to end this mission early by getting sucked into an intake vent and shredded in one of the cooling fans.   
  
They understood, but they didn't like it, and the walk into and through the increasingly prosperous town was a quiet one. All three of the male members were on high alert in case they happened to pass a materia or hand gun store, ready to put a virtual leash on either of the weapon and magic obsessive females they toted with them. It wasn't really a long trip to go from their landing point to the beginning of the mountain path, but Wutai had become a place thriving with commerce, specializing in arming its citizens with anything that could possibly help them if another war happened to break out.  
  
The path up the mountain in and of itself was nothing spectacular except in sheer length, as it would be a trying road to take without break even if it wasn't on a slow and ever present ascent up. Reno and Yuffie in particular had no such urge to even make the attempt, but when they were a quarter way, and then a half way, Tseng and Rude still surged ahead of all of them, showing no sign of either fatigue or stop. Even Elena, though lagging behind the two front runners, surpassed both Reno and Yuffie, who were forced to gripe at each other by default.   
  
"I thought you grew up here... you're trying to tell me that in all that time you haven't found a single damn better way up this stupid hill?" Reno took a shot, but his heart wasn't in it. His heart, like most of his bodily fluids, had probably been sweated out during the last two hours.  
  
"Your creepy leader up there with the head dot grew up here too, and he doesn't know any better way. And its a mountain, show some respect." That last part Yuffie said without much enthusiasm at all, because even the most stubborn of people tend to list on an obviously lost cause.  
  
"He spent twelve years hear," Reno replied smugly, "you've been around for what, at least fourteen?"  
  
"Oh ha ha," Yuffie muttered, "a height joke."  
  
"Actually," Reno corrected her, wiping the glistening sweat from his forehead for what had to be the ninth time in a row. "It was an experience joke. More specifically, your lack there of."  
  
With a snort, Yuffie dismissed his insult. "Ask any warrior on this continent if I'm experienced, and they'll respond-"  
  
Reno cut her off with a smile, as shed walked right into the verbal door he had left open for her. "-that yeah, she's gotten the bed expertise of the wisest crone, but god knows she fights with two left feet."  
  
Yuffie shot him a sour look. "I don't think you should be thinking about me having sex. You're what, fifty?"  
  
This gave Reno cause for real pause, and he glared over at her. "Excuse me?" he muttered. "I seem to remember you're about three years younger than me. It isn't my fault I have naturally rugged features and you're something out of a pedophiles wet dream."  
  
"Oh yeah?" Yuffie snarled, realizing that she had talked herself into a bad position, and was now trying to fight her way out of it by reducing their conversation to a two word exchange. Reno, however, did not respond, his eyes seemingly out of focus, and he stared out into the distance at a peak of rocks.  
  
"What?" Yuffie asked after her opening for a duel of yelling had gone unaccepted for far longer than she was willing to cope with. "What is it?"  
  
"...nothing," Reno said distractedly, and hastily pulled his sunglasses from his jacket pocket and popped them onto his face.  
  
"What the hell?" Yuffie asked, as he continued to stare at the same spot. "Please don't tell me those are actually prescription glasses. An assassin who needs eye correctional tools?"  
  
Reno resigned himself to ignore her, and then decided to ignore the entire issue that had started her talking again. The wind blowing a few rocks over was nothing to stare at anyway, it probably happened all the time in windy areas. As long as they were prevalent with rocks, of course. Shrugging back his dark blue jacket in hope of ventilating his body a little, Reno picked up his pace to catch up with Elena, who at the very least could finish a sentence without reminding him of one of those stupid cheerleaders who liked to walk through the slums with an entourage of at least fifteen preppy bitch jocks in an effort to look tough.  
  
"So..." he said brightly as he drew up behind her, and then quickly drew a blank on how to continue. Not until Elena gave him the same sort of look he imagined he'd have given Yuffie did he even really struggle in sequelizing his first thought with a second. "Some pretty fucked up shit is going on here, isn't it?"  
  
"...you noticed them too?" Elena acting genuinely surprise.  
  
Now it was Reno giving her the look. "Noticed them? We have two corpses walking around, both of which giving us orders, and only one of which barely felt like listening to even when he was alive. In case you haven't noticed, I haven't had much time to drink lately, so I am coherent enough to realize such things, yes."  
  
Haven't had time to drink? Elena thought with a snort. That was a laugh. It was common knowledge that Reno carried on him the same number of flasks that he did pistols, and while the total wasn't known to anyone besides the red haired Turk himself, it was common knowledge that the number was higher than two. "I wasn't talking about *that*," Elena snapped, though she did allow herself to admit that yes- it was quite odd, "I'm talking about Tseng and Rude. They're acting like they always do when someone is tailing us!"  
  
Reno blinked. "You know how they act when people are following us?"  
  
"Walk ahead, untuck their shirts so they can get to their guns faster, and keep their sunglasses low so they can look around better. Sort of like you walk, except they do it on purpose, and not just because they're stumbling idiots." Elena said simply.  
  
"Ah..." One thing Reno was starting to regret about Elena's apparent transformation was the rampant bitchiness which was just starting to reveal itself. He continued to walk at an accelerated pack, catching up to both Rude and Tseng, and noticed that indeed they seemed to be prowling with extra caution. Tseng's eyes never left the path ahead, but Rude glanced at him from the corner of his sunglasses.  
  
"So you've seen them too." Tseng said simply, not a question but a fact. In fact, Reno had no idea who the hell 'them' was supposed to be, but he nodded anyway.   
  
"One," he said, glancing around, "what the hell was it?"  
  
"Not sure." It was Rude who answered this time, which would have been obvious even if Rude were blind thanks to the quick, halting speech. "Big." He supplied, which was a sentence filled with colorful description that just wasn't very common of Reno's old best friend.  
  
"Uh..." Reno stopped dead, and his hand when straight to the handle of his knight stick, and then dropped away, almost as much as his jaw. "How big?"  
  
"Big enough." Rude, realizing Reno had stopped walking, followed suit, and turned to look at him. "Why?"  
  
Reno pointed a finger that would have been shaking if it wasn't for years of practice staying still while hopped up on caffeine pills. Both Rude and Tseng followed his look, until their eyes rested on an unusually high rock formation that they both could have sworn hadn't been there before. And then they realized it was looking at them, too. The top of it turned a bit to the side, like a human turns its head when deep in contemplation, and then with a shattering thud, the huge collection of rocks sagged down onto the path.  
  
It had to have been the most bizarre humanoid Reno had ever seen since waking up a week after the day that would have been his senior prom- you know, if he'd gone to school- with a girl he affectionately referred to as 'oh my god...' since that day. It was formed entirely of rock the same color and type that made the mountain they were walking on, but it was shaped almost like a gorilla, with stout legs, two massive, hulking arms, and a small, narrow head. A hush fell over the five travelers as it slowly raised that head to peer over them, and with growing dread, they turned around.  
  
Behind them, stood a second one.  
  
"Uh..." Reno said, and then repeated it. After that, there was silence, as the two towering pillars of rock simply seemed to be staring at them and sizing them up. There was the briefest of seconds where time itself seemed to stop, and no one moved.  
  
BAM! BAM! BAM!  
  
Three quick rounds fired from the tip of Rude's Desert Eagle. 45, smashing with a dull ping sound into the rocky heads of the creature they had seen first. A few puffs of dust flew into the air upon the impact of each one, but other than that no visible effect did the bullets have on the creature- save one. That one was it made it very, very mad.  
  
With a loud grating sound, the beast leapt forward, clearing a remarkable distance in a short amount of time. Its sudden movement seemed to snap the Turks back to life, and three pistols joined Rudes and blazed with fire. Yuffie, who knew her metal chakram would have even less effect on the monster than the bullets were, began to sort through her bag in search of any type of materia that might be helpful. Fire would be useless, Ice would bounce off...  
  
Meanwhile, even after the clips of the Turks guns had been emptied and the barrels to their pistols were smoking and red hot, the creature advanced still. The four scattered as it came nearer, and it ended up barging through nothing but thin air, but turned easily to face them once again. Behind it they could see the second monster, which was advancing at a much slower rate, apparently not as enraged as the first that the humans had dared shoot at him. Reno fumbled for his night stick and tripped, landing hard on his back in the dirt even as he ripped the weapon loose.  
  
The rock beast used this time to raise up right about the red haired men and raised its granite arms high above its head, at the same time as Reno pointed the Magna-Rod at the spot where its eyes should be. He thumbed the trigger all the way back, and a powerful jolt of electric lashed from the top and struck the beast with a force that would knock out any man and kill most of them. For a moment, the creature froze, and looked like it was going to collapse.  
  
And then it shrugged its shoulders, and prepared to strike.  
  
"Right..." Reno muttered helplessly, immeasurably disappointed in the effect his weapon had delivered. Bracing his hand and knee hard on the ground, he shoved and rolled out of the way of the downward strike, which had enough force to actually put a large crack in the path itself. The second one had reached him by this point, and utilizing its slightly longer legs than the first, reached back to kick him just as the second went for another arm shot. Rock smashed against rock in a horrible crunch, and Reno took advantage of the resulting dust cloud to quickly dart off the side of the path and dive behind a particularly large boulder that he just hoped wouldn't come to life and try to play soccer with him.  
  
Instead, much to his disgust, was Yuffie, though for once in her life she wasn't talking. Her eyes were firmly closed, and though her lips moved, no sound came out. In her hands, beginning to flicker with an inner green light, was a small materia orb.   
  
Back on the path, visibility became an option again, though there was very little for the two rock monsters to see. One of them now had an arm that was two feet less, and the dry remainder of the limb lay useless and limp on the path. Where the other Turks had gotten to Reno had no idea, but he was glad that they too had managed to disappear, at least for the time being. He allowed himself a few short breaths as he observed the creatures slowly look around, realizing that they apparently did see from something, as they were turning to get better views.   
  
A sudden shadow fell over him, and he rolled over in shock, expecting to see a Size 32 rock sneaker ready to grind him into jelly. Instead, something huge and black whipped past his head and continued going, only to be joined by a half dozen others. Several loud crashes came from the path, and turning around to catch the remainder of the action he'd just missed, Reno was rather surprised to see the Rock monsters on their backs, covered in what appeared to be several tons of rubble. Realizing what had happened, he shot Yuffie a dark look through his sunglasses.  
  
"Comet materia?" he asked in disbelief. "On big things made out of rock?"  
  
Yuffie shrugged at him. "It worked, didn't it?"  
  
Reno sighed and walked tentatively out from his hiding place, beaten to the punch by Tseng and Elena, who were already approaching the limp bodies of the monsters. Rude was quick to follow, and last of all Yuffie, and the five gathered around the fallen beasts. Reno, as usual, made the first observation.  
  
"What the fuck?"  
  
Tseng raises a skeptical eyebrow at him, but Elena didn't manage to restrain all of her laugh and barked the second half of it out. All right, thought Reno, maybe there is an upside to the loss of the whole helpless rookie persona. No one seemed equipped to answer Reno's question, which is actually why he had asked it, and why he was both surprised and annoyed when Yuffie opened her mouth.   
  
"Guardians." She said simply.  
  
Tseng turned his attention on her now. "Excuse me?" he asked, sounding very annoyed that she possessed a vital piece of information that he did not.  
  
"Of the sacred land," she elaborated, as if it should be obvious.  
  
Leveling her with his gaze, Tseng was looking just as disbelieving as before. "Do you know that, or are you just guessing?" he asked firmly.  
  
"There's never been a Mako Reactor on this continent," Yuffie responded sharply, with equal firmness. "What else could make something like that, if not the Planet itself?"  
  
"...now you sound like Aeris..." Reno muttered, but was promptly ignored.  
  
"Well they didn't do a very good job, did they?" Tseng asked, and prodded the leg of one with his toe. Almost instantly, the leg jerked, the whole group of five began to back up hastily as the two of the monsters began to stir, shaking off the gravel and larger chunks of rock off their immense bodies. Yuffie, for her part, looked completely taken aback.  
  
"What do we do??" she asked, sounding panicked.  
  
Rude provided one of his ever succinct answers. "Run." he said simply. "The other way."  
  
They wasted no time in doing just that. 


	14. In Hot F'N Water

Junon had changed a lot since the fall of the original Shinra, and no one had been gladder than the inhabitants of the city that the newly rebuilt company had simply decided to leave their home the hell alone. The coastline had become much more enjoyable without patrolling Shinra issue guards and a massive cannon sticking out of the center of it, and after they had cleared the rubble that was left of some of the Shinra offices everything had pretty much settled into an enjoyable, if not just a little dull, state.  
  
Which is why it was fairly reasonable for the precense of a man in a long white coat with spikey blonde hair, and a hard cut Gonganan with a massive sword to cause a bit of a stir amid the local townspeople.  
  
Zack and Rufus were well aware that they were being watched with less than welcoming gazes as they walked slowly down the main street of Junon. They would have taken any other, more secluded route if it had been possible, but the only elevator in existence that could take them down to the underwater Mako Reactor could only be accessed by going down the exact center of the town, and thus they simply decided to be as inconspicuos as possible. Due to the growing crowd watching their progress, they had apparently failed in that regard.  
  
The elevator was one of the few things that had been left undisturbed in the almost riotous destruction of all things related to Shinra in the last year or so, if only because no one was sure what would come up from below if they got rid of the barrier seperating them from it. This only added to the mounting worry of the villagers as Zack and Rufus approached the elevator without caution, and calmly pressed a button on the side that was marked 'down.'  
  
Rusted with infrequent usage, the doors stuck for a few seconds before opening, which they finally did with a small ding. The two men glanced inside, and then went to step in- before doing a sharp double take. Standing in the elevator, looking quite surprised himself, was a middle aged man with a face full of stubble and a rather wrinkeled blue uniform on. His eyes went straight to Rufus, and widened.  
  
"Mr. President!" he sputtered, and snapped to attention, raising his hand in a sloppy salute. Rufus heard a gasp behind him, far to the right, and quickly darted into the elevator, yanking Zack behind him, and shut the door. The Shinra guard seemed quite taken aback by this, but didnt drop his rigid pose until Rufus absently gestured for him to do so, running a hand back through his hair.  
  
"What the hell are you doing here?" he asked, rather unlike the president that the guard had been used to serving.  
  
"Uh... my duty, sir!" said the guard, sounding quite pleased with himself, apparently figuring he had come up with the perfect answer to this question. When Rufus' disbelieving gaze locked in on him, he instantly realized that this was not so, and chose to elaborate on what he had said. "Um, I was ordered to watch this elevator and regulate who was allowed in until relieved by a fellow officer, sir!"  
  
"You mean to tell me..." Rufus said slowly, "youve been on duty for over a year now? How have you survived?"  
  
In answer, the guard merely looked to the left, where a inclove room had been built into the wall. It seemed to contain very little, just a bed, a few piles of clothes, and several hundred stacked cans of freeze dried food. The whole thing seemed very unkempt, which was slightly understandable, as it appeared the man had only brought about a weeks worth of clothing anyway. Rufus looked at him with a sort of pitying admiration. "Soldier," he said simply, "you are relieved."  
  
The mans face lit up, but he didnt respond and give Rufus time to take back his order. Instead, he saluted smartly, wisely chose to ignore the ratty clothes he had in his little apartment, and opened the door to leave. Right before he exited, Rufus put his hand on his arm, and the man looked back at him in surprise. "Remember," Rufus said firmly, and Zack noticed that flickers of old coldness had swept back into his voice as easily as most people turn on a faucet, "this never happened."  
  
"Classified, right," the man nodded happily, and left as quickly as he could. Zack shut the doors behind him, and pulled the lever that would maneuver the elevator downward,all the while giving Rufus an odd look. Eventually, even the president couldnt pretend he didnt notice, and sighed with exasperation.  
  
"What?" he snapped.  
  
"Nothing..." Zack said with a shrug. "Was it just me, or were you actually nice to that guy?"  
  
Rufus gave him a cold stare, and seemed to be thinking of the most appropriate response. "Weve been going down for about two minutes," he said finally, "there is now roughly a hundred feet of water above us on every single side."  
  
An involuntary shudder ran through Zack, who glared angrily at Rufus. "Was that really necessary?" he snapped, leaning back hard against the steel wall of the elvator and beginning to take deep breaths. Suddenly the earlier chiding words of Rufus didnt seem worth it to dispell by coming down here. Water was... an incredibly stupid concoction. If it wasnt for the fact that we needed to drink it to live, Zack probably would have started some sort of movement to simply boil the oceans away and give us a hell of a lot more land to walk around on. And imagine all the pre-cooked fish.  
  
The trip down was incredibly long, even longer than Rufus had anticipated. Of course, very few people assumed that this elevator even went all the way down to the mako reactor- or could manage the trip- but it did and it could, though it took years of research to design and build a protype that could stand the pressure. In the end though, it simply hadnt been cost effective to send a submarine every time someone needed to make a routine check up, especially when the damn things kept getting high jacked by random do gooder terrorist groups.   
  
Even with the state of the art technology employed by the elevator, the two men inside couldnt even pretend not to notice the random squeak or groan that emitted on the trip downwards. Zack in particular was in the need of something hed never really valued before, even though most of the other Soldiers seemed to base their lives on it- an incredibly stiff drink. Monsters didnt scare Zack, you had a chance against monsters. He had a sword, and he had muscles, and if the thing ate him then it was his own damn fault. But water... you cant fight a tidal wave, and its not like any skill under god would let you swim thousands of feet straight up without taking a breath. It was just... wrong.  
  
The doors opened much with the same ding they had opened, but the sound held a very different meaning for Zack. When the doors opened, he expected to see glass walls, and thousands of tons of water all around, ready to snap in and bury him, to be discovered hundreds of years later and quickly put in whatever sort of book existed that listed some of the most unavoidable deaths ever. Instead he saw...  
  
...nothing.  
  
"Fuck," Rufus muttered angirly beside him, peering out in vain into the darkness. "Someone killed the lights. Well have to try to do this in the dark."  
  
Zack looked over at him in horror. "Is that even possible?" he asked.  
  
"Not really." Rufus said, and shrugged. "But at least you wont die by drowning anymore, youll just die by walking right into an exposed wire or something." Rufus glanced over to see what kind of effect his words had caused on his travelling companion, and his eyes widened.  
  
"Uh... Zack?" he muttered.  
  
"What?" Zack snapped, looking around in a sort of sustained panic.  
  
"Why is your sword glowing?" Rufus asked.  
  
"Huh?" Zack quickly ripped his long buster sword from its sheath on its back, and discovered that it did indeed seem to be emitting some sort of light. Nothing like a flashlight, a lamp, or even a torch, but a dull flickering glow, that allowed him to see at least four feet in any direction. Though inexplicable, it was a mild comfort to know he had it. "I'm not sure," he admitted. "And I don't really care."  
  
Taking a deep breath, the ex Soldier stepped out of the elvator, feet clanging on the hard metal ground of the mako reactor. Shrugging his shoulders, Rufus also stepped out, staying close enough that he could utilize the light offered by Zack's weapon. "Im fairly sure we just go straight ahead," he offered, feeling quite useless because thats the way they had begun to walk anyway. Zack, however, didnt seem to be listening.  
  
"Do you see that?" he asked slowly.  
  
Rufus shot him a look. "If youre referring the endless stretch of blackness, then yes, I absolutely do."  
  
"No," Zack growled, pointing his sword off to the side of the path. The light cast a bit further than it had before, and in the slightly illuminated area he was pointing out, shadows were dancing a little too actively for Rufus' tastes. "That. What the hell is it?"  
  
"Not sure..." Rufus said quietly, and calmly pulled his shotgun out from under his coat. He pumped two shells into the champer, clicked off the safety, and easily aimed into the center of the area where the shadows were moving. Surprised, Zack smacked his gun barrel down.  
  
"What the hell are you doing!?" he asked.  
  
Rufus glared at him. "Shooting it," he said cooly, "obviously."  
  
"You don't even know what it is!" Zack retorted harshly, keeping his hand on the top of Rufus' gun to keep it down as he peered closer, trying to see what shape the shadows were coming off of. "It looks like a dog!"  
  
With a snort, Rufus relented, and let his gun go limp in his grip. Satisfied, Zack released it, but kept a watchful eyeon his partner as he muttered something about no dog being able to survive down here. Not entirely encouraged by his words, but resolute to discover what the creature was, Zack began to take a few steps forward towards it, and for the first time Rufus did not follow to stay inside the light. The orb of visibility widened, bringing for a few seconds the features of the animal in the corner-  
  
-it was a dog.  
  
"See!?" Zack said calmly, turning around to shoot Rufus a smug look. To his horror, the president had raised his shotgun again, and before Zack could voice a protest he fired once with both barrels, and a pitiful whine that was suddenly silenced was all the indication Zack needed that the man had been on his mark. He didnt even turn around, disgusted at what he might see, and instead rounded angrily on Rufus.  
  
"What the hell is wrong with you!?" he cried, throwing his hands up. The light went with the sword, of course, casting them into darkness, and when Zack lowered the weapon Rufus still hadnt spoken, but was merely pointing at the still form of the animal. He walked straight up to it and knelt down, and Zack placed his sword down beside its limp body to get a better view. The fur on its flank was matted and blood stained, and dancing around its muzzle was thick, creamy foam. Zack looked back to Rufus in surprise.  
  
"Rabid." Rufus said simply, turning his head to the side to crack a stiff joint in his neck. "And about a half second from ripping your spine out when you turned around." Without waiting for Zack to say anything, or even to see if he followed with the light source, Rufus rose and trudged resolutely down the way they had already been going, but Zack noticed he didnt replace his weapon in its holster.   
  
With a sudden burst of speed the Gonganan caught up to him, and held the light a little closer to Rufus than himself in gratitute. "Hey man," he said, "I didnt know. Thanks."  
  
The look Rufus shot him over his shoulder was unbelievably cold, and a sneer played acrost the mans lips. "Im beginning to realize," he said slowly, "how a group of misfits managed to infiltrate my buildings and sabotage my operations over and over again. Apparently all it takes to be a Solider is a layer or two of muscle, and absolutely no grasp of the real world in their heads."  
  
Zack's eyes suddenly unfocused, staring back over his companion's shoulder. "Uh, Rufus..."  
  
"What?" The president snapped, "more dogs youd like to go pet?"  
  
"...not exactly..." Zack muttered, seized ahold of Rufus' arm, and with one hard thrust dove to the side and spun the president out of the way of a brilliant flash of energy that struck the floor in a minor explosion, temporarily lighting up the room. They seemed to have walked into a sort of office, what Zack had assumed was only a wider branch of the hallway, and it formed a veritable maze of desk, chairs, and tables. Ironically, it was only when the darkness retook, could they truly appreciate what was looming behind them.  
  
It appeared as if someone had shaved a gorrila, given it a few packs of steroids and some growth enhancements, and then force fed it napalm for a few weeks. The very skin of the creature seemed to glow and flicker with flames, that spread through its entire body, outlining its veins, bones, and nerves, and focused in a flat, featureless face, which sported only a gaping angry maw from which the enrgy had spawned. As Rufus and Zack lay, staring at it in shock, it reared back and fired again, managing to miss a second time, whizzing over their heads and striking a stack of wooden crates, lighting them instantly ablaze.   
  
Slipping a little on the wet metal floor, Rufus and Zack darted to one side and slid behind an upturned table, now visible thanks to the raging flames. Under the temporary protection, Zack shot Rufus an incredulous look. "What the hell is that!?" he said frantically.  
  
Rufus shrugged, worried despite his calm facade. "Mako mutation," he said quietly, as he once again slid shells into his shotgun with shaking hands. While what he had said wasnt entirely correct, it had to have been close enough. Just about a week before his untimely death, there had been reports of three men falling into one of the reactors ultra hot valves, and the end result was most likely what was currently trying to light Rufus up like a Christmas tree. He just hoped the other two had done the polite thing in such a situation and simply died.  
  
This time when Rufus rose up with his shotgun forward, Zack made no pretense of not wanting him to shoot- thus, of course, shooting is just what Rufus did not do. What he did was fall forward into a speedy summersault roll to avoid a high shot ball of fire, and then came up and emptied both barrels into the creature in front of him. The scattered shells hit it in both sides of the chest, and blew easily out the back, streaming smoke.  
  
The creature didnt even blink.  
  
'Shit', thought Rufus idly, as he was forced to run straight *at* the creature to avoid the fireballs it was launching right over the back of his head, where they promptly licked at the heels of his feet and began to melt the soles of the new shoes he'd picked up from Aeris. 'Shit, shit, shit... what is it with me and fire?' With a final burst of speed, Rufus came right up in front of the creature, and feeling the unbearable heat radiate off it, rolled to the left, just in time to clear the way as Zack leapt forward and swung his sword uppercut style, where it pierced the creature mid belly, sunk deeper as it arced up, cleaving chest, jaw, head, and coming out the top in a flaming arc. For a moment it looked like the creature was indeed going to split in twain, but after a moment of hesitation, the two halves slapped back together, and apparently bonded back in the flame, remained that way.  
  
For a moment, Zack stared at what used to be his sword. It was charred, black, and twisted, the glow extinguished, and he threw the now useless thing to one side and his body to the other to avoid yet another ball of fire coming his way. As tough as this thing seemed to be, it sure had bad aim, which was something of which Zack was eternally grateful. A pair of gun shots rang out behind him as Rufus once again tried his luck in shooting the thing- something that seemed exceedingly foolish to Zack, who failed to realize that the glass the structure was made of was strong enough to take a shot from most rockets, let alone a spray of bullets.  
  
Of course, an idea came to him suddenly, that maybe the walls cracking a bit would be one of the best things that could possibly happen.  
  
Vision aided by the now quite prevelant fires throughout the room, it didnt take Zack long to find what he was looking for- a pipe. Underwater or not, this place would need plumbing, and the Soldier took a moment to thank god that Shinra hadnt been one for flashy details, such as ceilings. Now he just needed something to bust it with...  
  
Zack froze in sudden shock as a scream of pain rang out, and he whirled on his heel. The fiery thing had managed to maneuver Rufus into a corner, and from the way the president was clutching his left forearm tightly and had a look of extreme anguish on his face, Zack realized that the creature's aim was getting decidedly better. Lining up a desk in the corner of the room, the soldier charged at it, snatched up the chair that lay on its side, and leapt on top of it, bringing the chair over his head in an incredible arc. He felt steel ring against steel, and with the feeling of a bat smacking a baseball, he felt the pipe give way.  
  
Instantly a cascade of water rained down upon his head, soaking him, the desk, the chair, and pretty much anything that happened to be in the vincinity of the desk, the chair, and him. Hoping the test his theory, Zack reared back and let the chair fly, tossing it into the back of the flaming creatures head. Though it seemed to do very little physical damage, a sizzling sound was heard as the damp object passed through the being, and it let out a gutteral growl, turning angrily towards Zack.  
  
"Ah." Zack said, realizing suddenly that his plan might not have been the best after all. For the first time seeming focused on something, the creature didnt even bother with a fireball, and instead charged him much in the manner a linebacker charges a quarterback who is fumbling blindly for a loose ball on the ground. Zack steadied himself for an extremely painful impact, watching the blur of red coming through water blinded eyes, which he promptly closed as the creature leapt, arms out reached, for his throat.  
  
He heard the sound that he imagined an entire chorus of snakes would make if they had suddenly been struck in the back with a shovel, and a torrent of steaming water struck him in the face, causing him to ball back, shielding his eyes from damage. He succeeded in that aspect, and opened them whole and undamaged, to see...  
  
...absolutely nothing at all. The creature, whatever the hell it had been, had apparently dissapeared in a sort of frenzied suicide, killing itself in its attempt to leap through the virtual waterfall. Chest heaving in pain, Zack rolled off the desk and hit the ground with a thud that seemed to remind him of a job well done. Slowly, he got to his feet, and saw Rufus crouched a few feet from him, staring distastefully at a cluster of dark brown skin that had formed due to the burn to his arm.  
  
"Im starting to realize," Zack said quietly, but with extreme relish, "how a group of misfits constantly infiltrated your buildings and sabotaged your operations. Your leader thinks he can use fire arms to fight actual fire."  
  
Rufus snorted and shot him a glare, but there was little malice behind it. Instead, in a deep set way, Zack was startled to see fear. "You do know," Rufus said slowly, picking himself up gingerly. "That this is an underwater facility? No openings, no doors, no windows..."  
  
"So?" Zack asked, dissapointed Rufus hadnt tried to sting him back.  
  
But the president was preoccupied, watching the water pour from the broken pipe in incredible amounts. "No drains," he said simply, and then looked down, where the water was already forming a thin layer of dampness over the entire floor. Inadvertantly, Zack had just given them a very strict dead line to get out of here, because it wouldn't be too long before the water that was being siphoned into the room would spread, and if given enough time, rise to the ceiling.  
  
This all came to the Gonganan in one impactful, sickening moment, and he reeled. "Oh." Was all he could think of to say, before promptly turning to the side and throwing up.  
  
In the dying remains of the fire, hed seen exactly what he dreaded- tons of water pressing in on them from all sides through thick glass walls. At least, what had seemed to be in all directions. Now, with hydration rising steadily from the floor, was it truly closing in at every angle possible.  
  
Zack took a moment to collect himself, and then retched again.  
  
[A/N: Im not much one for Author's Notes myself, I think their presumptuos methods for ass holes to get props for things they are doing about 85% of the time, or begs for compliments, reviews, or what the hell ever. This is more like a recognition of my failures, as Im not much one for writing action scenes (or, as my naysayers would comment, for writing anything at all). Hopefully I will be able to over come this, as this will very much so be one of those stories that climaxes in a clusterfuck of fighting. I apologize if this puts you off, but hey, thats just me.] 


	15. Oooo Shiny Weapons

[Note to Reviewer: Tini. The pen name is Tini. No 's' on the end. Also- small amounts of reviews make me a saaaad Tiger. *Blinks* Ok, overly dated South Park reference. Seriously though, tell your friends. ]  
  
Cid parked the Highwind in a wide stretch of plains, quite a comfortable place, and the others thanked him for it, though strictly speaking it would have been harder for him to *not* do so than it was for him to actually do it. The area surrounding Kalm was, simply put, nothing but wide stretches of plains, except for the occasional stretch of plain that was more long than wide, and even that was debatable depending which way you were turned. They left the ship, as usual, in the care of the trusted crew, and began the short march towards the Chocobo Ranch.  
  
Despite the Highwind's easy adaptation to storing and caring for Chocobo, it hadn't taken the adventurers long after the destruction of Sephiroth to realize that the normally quiet and serene birds went absolutely berserk when they were taken into the air under any power other than their own, and it was decidedly less of a hassle to walk back to the ranch every time they needed some land transportation than it was to try to sedate them whenever they needed some land transportation *after* some air transportation.  
  
Chocobo Billy was glad to see them, and had actually got quite used to it. He had seen the Highwind soar overhead in the distance, heading towards its destination, and had gotten their Chocobo's gathered together in the outside stable. Thus, the crew was greeted both by Billy himself, and by the warble of the birds they had painstakingly tracked and bred over the last year. Tifa in particular felt a little bad to have to lead the Blue Chocobos back into their private pens, but after all, they wouldn't be needing them. They weren't expecting any water where they were going.  
  
They were heading over the mountains.   
  
They explained quickly to Billy that they didn't have time to stay for their customary lunch, and were on fact on quite a rushed schedule, and he responded by actually shooing them on their way. "After all," he'd said, "it would be right stupid to fall late on account of the guy who you came to to speed you on your way."  
  
They admitted that his logic worked, and indeed wasted no time on getting starting towards the Kalm mountains, plodding quickly along on their gathering of Green Chocobo's, and of course Tifa's golden one. Despite being in a hurry, they had Tifa leading the way, and she just couldn't resist the urge to go a little less than top speed just to enjoy the scenery that was Kalm in the summer. Still, they certainly weren't going at a snails pace, and they were deep into the mountains long before nightfall, where they were forced to dismount and build a fire, setting up camp for the night.  
  
Cid, ever the pilot of war, was asleep on the hard ground before they could even tell him that they'd packed sleeping bags. It was typical of the old pilot, to take the path of most resistance even without knowing he was doing it, but seeing as he looked perfectly content curled up on the grass, mud, and rock, the rest of them let him be.  
  
The rest of them gathered around the flames, minus Cait Sith, who Reeve had deactivated to save power. Barret and Reeve leaned against the same log, though a comfortable masculine distance from each other, while Tifa and Cloud curled up openly in a sleeping back, and while Tifa dozed off to sleep in his grasp, Cloud seemed both awake and alert, eyes focused on the flames before him.  
  
"So." Barret said, managing to break the ice with his usual tool- a blunt statement. "Were on the job again."  
  
"I'm always on the job..." Reeve muttered quietly, and intentionally unheededly. He had much preferred his lower ranking job in the old Shinra, than his current one in the new variety, as it had involved a lot more paperwork and a lot less mental anguish. He hardly ever got to experiment with things anymore, and he was sure that Cait was grossly behind the technology curve at the moment.  
  
"Yeah..." said Cloud distantly, his eyes not leaving the fire. "But we had a year break, and I think the salary we accumulated sort of levels out to being well compensated for our efforts. I probably have two dozen houses I've never been to that were simply given to me by rich celebrities who wanted to get in their annual charity work."  
  
"Probably for tax purposes," Reeve said with a laugh, leaning further back against the log and putting his hands behind his head. He had no illusions about the real world, and especially the business world, and he knew that absolutely nothing was free, even if the only cost that ever came apparent was that you helped benefit someone when they were pretending to be charitable. "And speaking of which, all that property would probably eat you alive with taxes."  
  
"Mm." Barret grunted. "Of course, its not like we have to pay taxes anymore. Ever."  
  
"That *is* nice," Reeve admitted, "not that I really got enough money out of the deal that taxes would hurt me. Apparently people didn't care for the double agent concept, and they didn't understand that you cant send checks in the name of a toy cat. It took three months before I managed to get him legalized as under my official care so some of the donations started coming through."  
  
All through this, Reeve's voice was fading, the common effect of a starry night, warm air, and a crackling fire being immediate and powerful waves of sleepiness. Tifa had succumbed to the urge even before Reeve had stopped talking, and only Barret and Cloud remained awake after ten or so minutes of silence, even the background music of the crickets seeming to cease. Cloud could tell that Barret had something on his mind, but didn't really seem to be ready to bring it up, so he prompted him in a different direction instead.  
  
"How's Marlene?" he asked quietly.  
  
It was just about then that Cloud realized to what a shocking degree he had come to know his traveling companions, as Barret reacted exactly as he'd expected to a direct question- by ignoring it. With a deep, lumbering sigh, the large man stared up at the crescent moon and growled. "It's never goin' to end, is it?" he asked no one in particular.  
  
Cloud, being the only one present, chose to answer. "Huh?"  
  
"The danger. The fightin'. The evil." Barret said, and sighed again. "I lost my best friends, my wife, and my arm to god damn Shinra, and we beat dem. But right away, somethin' else comes around. Somethin' worse. And even if we beat it, and Ill level with ya Spike, I'm not sure we will, what den? Somethin' even worse than dat?"  
  
To that, Cloud had no answer, besides to simply shake his head, though whether it was in rejection of the evil of which Barret spoke, the possibility of defeat, or even simply disagreeing with the mans theory, he himself did not know. He just felt like he needed to be rejecting something right now, when so many had been dumped right into his lap that he had no chance of avoiding. Like Aeris. "Aeris," he said simply, as a way of bringing up the topic while at the same time admitting he had no idea what to say about it. Gravely, Barret nodded.  
  
"Aeris," he said.  
  
And with everything that needed to be said having been said, the two joined the others in slumber.  
  
***  
  
They awoke the next morning with usual stiffness, though no worse for the wear than they had been the night before. Even Cid, upon seeing the inflated sleeping bags, merely shrugged and muttered something about sissies, and went off to find some water to boil over the fire for tea. In less than a half hour they were packed, fed, and ready to go, and after a few moments of doing the same for the Chocobo, the party started off again.  
  
The only real problem at the moment was that didn't have any exact coordinates for where the hell they were going. All Aeris had said was the 'top of the mountain', but as far as they could see the mountain was too level to have any one true peak, and it was going to take forever to walk the entire length of the top. However, since- as so many things- they had no choice in this matter, they chose to simply let their Chocobo lead the way, and decided they would start looking from there.  
  
It wasn't long before cool green grass faded to dark gray stone, and the way started to become rougher as the Chocobo no longer had soft land on which to tread. They soon came into a part of the mountains that they hadn't crossed in their last journeys over these parts, mountains that much reminded them of Nibelheim in their steep, spiky juts. And it was after rounding a corner, and then looking a considerable ways up, that they saw the peak, suddenly revealed out of the swirly white clouds above that seemed to get darker the closer they hovered to the mountain side.  
  
"Is that where were heading?" said Tifa, not managing to conceal the awe in her voice.  
  
"I guess..." Cloud said from somewhere behind her, with a shrug. "It shouldn't take that long, that just looks impossible because were used to going on feet. These birds can do anything though, can't they?" he added that last part while scratching his chocobo under the chin. It warbled appreciatively.  
  
Their progress was slower from then on out, winding and cautious, and at some point they were moving at such steepness that the travelers actually felt they were going to fall backwards off their Chocobos saddles, and clutched the reigns especially tight. Finally, and almost thankfully, they came to a spiky narrow that even the Chocobos couldn't cross, and they tied them off to a rock. Fighting nose bleeds, popping ears, and dizziness, the travelers continued on, ducking into the dark cave that lay ahead of them.  
  
It was damp, bright, and glittering, and glew with the constant energy of a mako cave, though no particular fountain could be spotted from the entrance. Most of them had never been in such a cave before, and stared around in amazement at the flashing colors that swirled all around them, while Tifa and Cloud simply shared common, slightly less happy memories about areas near a similar place. For some reason the sound of water running was all around them, though it wasn't raining and no stream was visible.   
  
Absently, Cloud kicked aside a rock, and with a slight bubbling of liquid he solved the question both of running water and the location of the mako fountain. Out from under the sudden gap in the cave floor swept a stream of thick, dark green liquid. Experimenting, Cloud reached down and grabbed the edge of the whole stone, and pulled back as hard as he could. The extra energy actually seemed to be wasted, as the rock pulled easily away, and when he tossed it away he let out a gasp of surprise.  
  
"Woah..." he muttered.  
  
The others gathered around in surprise, before looking nervously at the rock around their feet. In the exposed hole that Cloud had made, there showed just a fraction of a pool of mako, and they couldn't see any end or shallowness to it at all. It appeared that the entire cave floor was just a thin layer between them and the ocean of mako, and that made the adventurers- especially Barret, who was the biggest, and Tifa and Cloud, who had been forced to go through a Lifestream swim before- incredibly nervous. On sudden instinct, Cloud stalked over to a stone wall of the cave, and threw his steel elbow pad hard against it.  
  
Only the smallest of cracks appeared in that wall, but from that crack ran a dribbled drop of green liquid, slowly running down the side of the cave until it hit the floor and made a minuscule pool. Cloud stared around himself in amazement. "It's everywhere," he said, sounding worried.  
  
"Huh?" Reeve looked up from the pool of mako they were gathered around and glanced over at Cloud. "What's everywhere?"  
  
"Mako." Cloud said simply, and weakly. "This entire cave is filled with it. Its like a liquid barrier between the part of the cave we see and the mountain..."  
  
"Well." Reeve said, blinking. "That's disturbing."  
  
"Yeah..." Cloud answered simply, for all of them, and suddenly the entire group had had enough of the talking. They walked on in silence, slower and more lightly than before, as if at any second they expected their feet to punch through the floor, wherein they would sink up to their knees in mako, and would pull out the leg with tentacles sticking out of it or something. In fact, it might have been better if they had been going at their usual pace, as then Cid would have missed the groove in the floor, and spared himself the rather nasty lump he took from crashing to the ground.  
  
"Fuck," he snarled, turning around hastily to see what had tripped him. He saw two things that could have been the possible culprits, and neither of them should have been anywhere near the cave. "Uh, guys..." he said slowly, leaning closer to inspect what had sent him to the ground. The rest gathered around to inspect the offending objects.  
  
The first was a slit, about five inches wide but only about a fourth of that long, and it appeared to go straight down in the rock until it disappeared from sight. The other one, oddly enough, appeared to be a leather hilt that had apparently been well worn in, but was still in remarkable condition. Cloud leaned down and grabbed hold of it, meaning to scoop it up with a quick pull. It didn't budge.  
  
"What the..." he muttered, and leaned in to look closer. "Its a sword," he said in surprise. "In the same kind of hole as this one... but it's stuck."  
  
"Move over Spike..." Barret elbowed him quickly to the side, and grasped hold of the hilt with both of his meaty hands. To their surprise both of them wrapped easily along around the handle itself, even though it hadn't appeared to be close to long enough a few seconds ago, and he reared back with a mighty tug.  
  
There was a small crick as he popped a stiff joint in his spine. That was, apparently, the only thing that was going to give. "Well damn." Barret said, and stepped away. "That's weird."  
  
Cid and Reeve both took their turns trying to free the weapon, which is required in the code of pointless masculinity, but both of them failed much in the same ways that Barret and Cloud had. Tifa, however, had utilized her lack of a Y Chromosome and used the time instead to study the second groove, and came up with a sudden surprised exclamation. "Cloud?" she asked quickly.  
  
After a moment, he looked over from the handle.  
  
"I think your Ultima Sword would fit in this. In fact..." Tifa peered closer. "It looked like it was carved to fit exactly?"  
  
"Really?" Cloud asked curiously, drawing the glittering blue crystal weapon from its sheath, and sizing it up with the hole. It did indeed appear to be a perfect fit, and Cloud admitted it, but still appeared to have his doubts. "But what if this gets stuck then?" he asked. "I don't want to be weaponless around here."  
  
"True," Tifa admitted, "but what if it lets go of the other sword?"  
  
"Like it'd be better than this one?" Cloud snorted, looking the hilt over up and down, and then looking at the hilt of his own sword. Tifa let up an exasperated sigh that was only half exaggerated.  
  
"Aeris told us we need these!" she persuaded him, "She didn't say anything about the weapons we already had, did she?"  
  
A man wise in the way of relationships, and especially of the one fundamental rule- in a disagreement between a man and women, if the man has nothing to win but principle, he should be sure to suddenly realize that the girl is absolutely right. Not saying a word, and not daring to glance over at their three male companions, who were sniggering appropriately, Cloud positioned his sword over the slit, and drove it down. It slid into the hole perfectly, all the way to the hilt.  
  
A sound like thunder rang out. The group fell back, hands instinctively raising their weapons- or in Barrets case, hand simply raising, and the weapon coming with it via surgical attachment- from whatever attack may be coming. But instead of some kind of monstrous threat, they were greeted instead to the walls literally falling apart in massive chunks of rock, including a boulder so huge it kicked up too much dust to see for several minutes. While the others coughed and covered their eyes from the sudden visual attack, Cloud calmly wrapped his hand around the buried hilt.  
  
The sound of steel sliding against stone met their ears seconds before their vision cleared, and they saw Cloud standing still, a shimmering silver sword raised high above his head, reflecting light from absolutely nowhere off of its perfect surface. Reeve, Barret, Tifa and Cid all stared at its edge, and were greeted by a marless reflection of themselves staring straight back. Reeve quietly voiced what they were all thinking.  
  
"Wow," he said. And then something caught his eye to the left, and his gaze twitched involuntarily again in that direction. There was a split second pause. "Wow," he repeated.  
  
The rest followed his gaze. Along the wall, now exposed by the falling rocks, and highlighted by the cool green glow of mako, was an assortment of weapons that seemed very much to be levitating off the ground. A set of incredibly dark leather gloves with three long juts of steel emitting from just in front of the knuckles of each. What appeared to be a glove, metal, but seemingly segmented and jointed in so many areas that it could be twisted or bent in any possible way. What may or may not have been a spear; a coral blue weapon that seemed to be nothing but twists and curves, that corkscrewed down into two razor sharp points on either side. And last, horrifyingly, what appeared to be a dead bird, lying limp and motionless.  
  
The unarmed travelers rushed quickly up to them in varying states of amazement, and Cid quickly snatched the spiraling spear up, while Tifa grabbed the gloves. Reeve, however, ever the fan of mechanical items, had gone directly for the metallic hand, and in reaching for it, had quickly found that his hand passed straight through, tips touching against the stone wall behind. "What the hell..." he muttered, and tried again, with little fruition. Barret, who had been slowly inspecting the bird with growing wonder, looked over.  
  
"What's wrong?" he asked, clearly looking for a distraction to look away from the animal- or what seemed to be an animal.   
  
"It's a hologram," Reeve muttered in confusion, trying yet another vain attempt to grab it. Barret lumbered up, and gave him a pointed look.  
  
"I bet..." he said, easily snatching the glove out of the air. Before continuing his sentence he quickly fiddled with the bolts on his right wrist, and popped the Maximum Score right off. With apprehension, he placed the base of the hand, which was producing a series of wires that Reeve had somehow overlooked, into the adapter on the tip of his wrist. There was a spark of electricity, and the hand locked with the wrist. Barret jumped a moment in surprise, and the fingers of the glove widened in likewise emotion. Amazed, he wiggled the hands thumb, the pinkie, the middle, and then all the fingers at once. "...this is mine." He finally finished, staring unbelievably at his own wrist.  
  
"Oh." Reeve said. He wasn't sure why he wasn't over come with incredible interest with the weapons the others had come across, but it simply alluded him. Christmas morning syndrome had hit him hard, and he simply couldn't focus on something until he'd gotten hold of his own Legacy item. He hurried over to the bird in the hopes that it could be some sort of a clue, but no, it was simply a bird, and a terribly sad image at that. Suddenly overcome with regret, he ran his finger down the shiny metallic spine of the bird.  
  
And then froze.  
  
Metallic?  
  
With a sudden chirping sound, the eyes that had moments ago been black and empty on the bird lit up red, and with the humming sound of machinery long slumbering coming to life, the bird lifted itself higher in the air, dropped a bit, beat its wings, and remained aloft, hovering in front of Reeve's face, and staring thoughtfully at him. Reeve blinked.  
  
"Er... hello?" he said. "You wouldn't happen to know of a weapon that looks just about right for me, would you?"  
  
The bird made a grating noise that sounded amazingly close to indignant, and moved a little closer to Reeve's face. Recognition suddenly came into his eyes, and he exhaled deeply. "Ohhhhh..." he said. "Well. Hello little Legacy weapon."  
  
It chirped again. Not knowing why, Reeve smiled, and then glanced over at Cid. "I like your spear." He said helpfully.  
  
"Neptune's Highlight?" Cid asked absently, trying to look straight down the spear, which of course made him incredibly dizzy. "Thanks."  
  
"Neptures Highlight?" Tifa asked, taking a few practice swings at the air with her bladed gloves. She relaxed her grip, and jumped as the blades quickly receded back into some unknown part of the glove themselves. She tensed it, and the blades popped out again. She giggled, and then quickly reaffirmed her attention of Cid. "Is that what you named it?"  
  
"No." Cid said simply. "That's what its called."  
  
"...huh." Barret said, clearly having no intentions of assigning a name to his hand. "How 'bout you Spike? What's that pretty little letter opener called?"  
  
Cloud hadn't moved a step since he drew his sword from the rock. He stared at its long, two handed handle, up and down its bright silver blade inscribed in a language he'd never heard of, and most of all, listened to the buzzing feeling in his hands as he held it. "Excalibur seems fitting," he said with a smile, hoping they'd think his reference to the Arthurian legends was a joke rather than a true feeling. Suddenly the Ultima Sword sticking out of the ground seemed very inconsequential. Something else, however, caught his eye.  
  
"What the hell is that?" he asked, pointing behind them, and they turned appropriately. Looking further back in the cave, almost completely hidden, hovered one of the most bizarre things they had ever seen. A large robotics suit that looked like it could entirely enclose a man- albeit a short one- within an opening in the inside. Above it, chiseled into the rock, was a name.  
  
"Tyler Lucia?" Tifa read allowed, and turned to Reeve. "Isn't that your last name?"  
  
Slowly, looking incredibly pale, Reeve nodded. The bird beside him let out a discontent grate.  
  
"What, got a brother?" Cid asked.  
  
Reeve shook his head.  
  
"Actually," he said, with a catch in his voice, "I have a son." 


	16. Fire, Ice, and Poison

"You know what I like best about the cold?"  
  
Gabriel's voice came out tired and strained, as he and Rory had been walking for several hours down the narrow stone rimmed path, feet sinking deeply into an inexplicable snow every step they took. How the frosted precipitation had managed to get into the cave itself, and to go as far as coating the floor, neither of them knew, but seeing how it had only come into existence recently they guessed that the path opened up to the sky soon. Explanations or not, however, both of them were cold, wet, and exhausted, and Gabriel's questions had been the first words spoken in about thirty minutes.  
  
Rory, who had sported a shorter pair of legs, had began to lag behind him despite her lighter frame to carry. She gathered a sudden burst of energy and pushed herself forward to catch up, answering his question with a brand of dry humor that she always sported when she was particularly uncomfortable. "Let me guess," she said slowly, "its perverted and is involved in the process of breast feeding?"  
  
With a snort, Gabriel shook his head, watching the burst of fog burst out from his nose. That was, in fact, a second thing that he liked about the cold, how easy it was to make yourself look like a bull. Fun stuff. But it hadn't been what he was thinking of when he had first spoke up. "Nah," he said slowly, "try to crack one of your knuckles."  
  
Shrugging, Rory complied, reaching up to seize her pinkie, and quickly twisting the tip of it to the side with a popping sound. Instantly, her skin, which had turned chalky white due to the freezing conditions, quickly colored with a swirl of red, and a second after it had returned to white a searing pain raced through her finger. "Ow!"   
  
Gabriel chuckled slowly and kept on walking, wondering how often that trick would work on people. Probably until he tried it on somebody with a gun, at which point it would no longer be an issue, as he would no longer be able to ask the question. Not without working out some sort of blinking alphabet system. He squinted into the depth of the tunnel, licked his lips, and braced his neck. About two seconds after he'd done so a large, tightly packed snowball smacked into the back of his neck, and he slowly wiped the stinging ice from the back of his neck, not giving Rory the gratification of complaining, or even turning around.  
  
A moment later, a second snowball came at him, but arced over his right shoulder and smacked into the stone wall beside him. Once again, he pretended not to even notice, but a flicker of doubt washed over his smile. That one had contained a rock in the center, that would have hurt like hell.  
  
Then he felt something smack into the back of his head directly level with his ears, and instantly wished he had been hit by the second. "Hey!" he cried, spinning around. "You're supposed to at least pack some snow around the rock!"  
  
Rory laughed and faked innocence for about three seconds, and then simply broke out in a triumphant smirk. "So," she ventured, "what the hell do you expect to find?"  
  
"Honestly?" Gabriel asked, resuming his pace.  
  
"Honestly," Rory confirmed, doing the same.  
  
Gabriel paused. "Nothing," he said, after a moment.  
  
"Nothing?" Rory asked in surprise.  
  
"Nothing." He agreed. "The world is filled with many fucked up things. Lunatics, rapists, murderers, religious fanatics, and guys who are actually addicted to eating lard. The world is not," he added, "something that has a mind of its own. And you know, even if it did, I don't think it would be a weapon maker. It would probably make pansy little booties or something."  
  
"True..." Rory said, though it probably couldn't be plainer that she disagreed. Rory didn't know why, but faith was one of the few things she'd always possessed that most people didn't have. The problem was, she didn't know exactly what it was she had faith in. Everything she heard she was supposed to believe and to believe in, she didn't. Everything she heard that was completely wrong, she could usually feel some sort of connection with. "I don't know," she said, arguing both with Gabriel and her own statement, "when I was younger I used to pretend I could hear the planet talking. Half the time though, when I was making up stuff it was saying in my head, it got weird. It was like it wasn't really talking, but like I had no control over what I was making it say. Like something was simply putting the ideas of what it was saying into my head, and I heard it that way."  
  
Her words faded into an uncomfortable silence. After a bit, she murmured, "I was probably just a dumb kid, though."  
  
Gabriel didn't know what to say. He thought it was quite clear that Rory was nothing near dumb, but he didn't know how to state so without violating his firm opposing to everything involving fate, destiny, and a higher power. Instead, he chose to commentate on something else she mentioned. "What was it like?" he asked, "living in Midgar slums? I never really lived in a big city until I was already in the Turk training program."  
  
"Dirty." Rory said simply, obviously not wishing to discuss it. "But about what you said... how did you manage to get into a group like that? From what Reno told me, you can't be very nice."  
  
A ghost of a smile crossed his face, and quickly faded away. He half closed his eyes, as if a full scope of vision clouded his memories, and spoke softly. "I'm not really sure."  
  
Rory looked over at him in surprise. "Huh?" she asked.  
  
"I'm not sure," he repeated. "I was born in Kalm, I think. I remember a lot of hills, and a lot of green, and that could be a lot of places, but God knows I'm not from Kalm and I don't have the eyes for someone who was born in Mideel." A distant memory crossed his mind, a friend of his who'd had the almost neon green eyes of a man born on that island. He was probably thirty something now, or all out dead. The fact that the latter was far more likely than the former didn't make him near as sad as he'd thought it would, or should.  
  
"And?" Rory prompted, reminding him that he was telling a story and this wasn't the best time to go off on a walk through random memory lanes.  
  
"Yeah..." he said irrelevantly. "And then it goes blank, until I'm walking into a Shinra office, I'm dressed in blue, and a really tall, really pale man is explaining what he calls 'the rules of the game' to us. As far as rules go, these were pretty weird... but with nothing left to do, I followed them, for about a year I guess. Things sort of settled into normal, I went out drinking one night, and boom- I wake up naked in an alley with you. Quite a life, huh?"  
  
"Oh..." Rory said slowly, "you talk awfully mature for someone who can only remember the cliff notes to his own life. What, were you in a coma or something?"  
  
"Dunno." Gabriel said simply, and shrugged. "I doubt it, 'cause like you said, I don't talk like a three year old and I know how to do a lot of shit. For instance, I can put disassemble and put a hand gun back together in under twenty seconds. While mixing a martini. Not to mention my bodies not all atrophied and weak." He added that last part, he thought, with far too much pride.  
  
"So you just can't remember it..." Rory said.  
  
"Yeah." He nodded. "I guess."  
  
"Maybe you're lucky. Sometimes I wish I couldn't remember any of my life." Rory said suddenly, breaching the subject that shed turned away just seconds earlier.  
  
"Really?" Gabriel asked, "Any parts more than others?"  
  
"Eh." Rory said, exhaling deeply. "All of the parts that involved being cold, or hungry, or tired... or eyed by some of the perverted pedophiles in limousines who patrolled the neighborhood looking for a lil girl who wanted a candy bar." She twitched especially hard at that one, and then looked desperately for something to change the subject with. "Do you see that?"  
  
"What?" Gabriel asked, going suddenly alert.  
  
"That..." Rory's voice changed strangely. She had first said it without actually seeing anything, but a sudden sparkle down the tunnel caught her gaze. "C'mon," she said, and began to walk a little faster, hoping to god that maybe it was a space heater or anything they could light on fire. Gabriel hurried to keep up with her, trudging quickly through the ever deepening snow.  
  
They entered into what had to be one of the most bizarre rooms that either of them had ever seen, and not just because it was, in fact, a carved out room in the middle of a mountain path. Three tall pillars jutted up from the floor in a triangle pattern, apparently made of stone or some sort of crystal. The ground around the pillars seemed radically different in every respect, the first one having snow piled up all around it, the second having a large ring of bare rock where their was absolutely no ice of any kind, and the third had a group of dark purple, sickly looking plants sprouting up straight through the ice and the stone. Embedded in the top of each pillar was a long, leathery handle.  
  
"Woah..." they said together, and shared a look. Together, they approached the closest pillar, which unfortunately was the one waist deep in snow. Struggling over the ice, Rory suddenly slipped, and falling forward, reached for the leather handle for support. Somehow, though she didn't understand it, she missed, and went tumbling to the ground. Gabriel leapt up to help, but upon seeing her lying fine but rumpled, couldn't help but laugh.  
  
"Very funny..." she muttered, pushing herself to her feet. "Why don't you try to grab it?"  
  
"Aight..." Gabriel balanced himself slowly on the ice, taking baby steps across it until he was within range of the handle, which he promptly grabbed. He'd expected it to come away easily, as if it had been perfectly balanced, but instead he felt a kink, and pulled it away slow as a long, sheathed blade came with it, emerging from the pillar itself.  
  
"Woah..." Rory said, leaning forward for a closer look. "Come on, let's see it."  
  
Seizing the sheath, Gabriel slowly began to pull it off of the blade, revealing the base that was an incredibly dark blue. With a flourish, he pulled it off the rest of the way, and went to inspect his new weapon, stopped by only two things. First, a wave of incredible cold came at him, causing him to turn his face, and a second after that- blackness hit.  
  
***  
  
"Its 4:00. Time for your pill."  
  
He hated the man. And he hated his pill even more. He didn't know who the man was, or what the pill was, he just knew that he hated them both to an incredible degree. The man was tall, pale, and wearing a long white lab coat, which was amazingly clean considering the greasy condition of his long brown hair. The pill was green.  
  
"No!" he heard himself saying, in a voice not entirely his own. It sounded... higher, and far more irritating. Kind of like a six year old who didn't want to take a bath, because he'd just get dirty the next day anyway. I mean, who cares that he was probably carrying six kinds of disease on him from the grime outside, baths were inconvenient.   
  
"Its 4:00," the voice repeated dryly, malice creeping into its tone. "You will take your pill."  
  
"NO!" he was screaming this time, and he was trying to lash out, but something was holding him down. Not completely, just his limbs and his head, and as if to prove it he threw his chest out wildly in an effort to break the bonds. A sigh was his answer, and the greasy haired man shook his head.   
  
"Heavens," it said, "I thought we were past this. I thought you had grown up."  
  
As if from no where, a syringe was produced, but for some reason he wasn't objecting to that. Needles, normal medication, apparently those hadn't scared him... but the pill, that was terrifying. The needle sunk into his arm, and almost immediately he felt sleepiness wash over him, and his eyes slid shut as the man in the white lab coat stared in humor at the needle, which was dribbling a cool blue liquid down its edge.  
  
***  
  
Gabriel blinked. His cheek was cold. Idly he realized that it was exactly as cold as it had been before his bizarre vision, or memory, or whatever it was. In fact, everything was exactly the same as it had been. The entire disturbing visual had lasted less than a second, apparently. Feeling mildly put out, Gabriel shook his head, and returned his gaze to the blade. It shimmered in a bizarre way that made it look like it was reflecting the light at angles that weren't really possible, and the cold it emitted was enough to make him replace the sheath in a few more seconds. His eyes met Rory.  
  
"Wow," he said.  
  
"Wow," she agreed. They shrugged, climbed away from the ice, and each walked towards a different pillar. Gabriel, with longer legs, longer arms, and less of a bruise from a nasty ice fall, got to his first, and this time the effect was different- the blackness hit him the second his hand wrapped around it.  
  
***  
  
Flashing lights. Lots of flashing lights. And sirens. Oh god damn the sirens, God damn the sirens to hell. They were always the worst part, as his ears were sensitive, and he was really prone to head aches in those years.  
  
He did a mental stop.  
  
What years?  
  
Honestly, he didn't know what years he was thinking about, except that he was prone to head aches during them. Especially during these little expacades by the guy with the greasy hair, who would move him from the monotony of being strapped down and take him instead into the blinding activity of being strapped down in a room with a strobe light and a siren. And the itch was starting...  
  
...he tried to fight it like he always did. He didn't like the itch, and he truly didn't like what came after it. Especially because it made the man in the coat so fucking happy. Once in a while he able to fight to itch, hold of the resistance to symbolically scratch it, but usually not. Those rare times he did, the way Mr. greasy hair looked like he had just swallowed sour milk was classic, but this was not one of those times.  
  
Which would it be? He felt to distant to really feel which one was bubbling up like he usually could, even though he only had three places to look to. Then he felt his skin begin to bubble and stretch, and new exactly what- the armor. Hadn't it been different in those days? Oh, that's right, it had been painful...  
  
Screams ripped from him, from pain and horror as he literally felt his rib cage realign itself in his chest, and he felt an empty sucking system as most of his internal organs simply disappeared. Out of the corner of his pain glazed eye, he could just see the greasy haired man, a bright disgusting smile on his face.  
  
***  
  
Her face hurt. Honestly, everything hurt, but that was the main thing. Her face. It was swollen with bruises, and a long gash traveled down the left side of it. One of her eyes was swollen shut, and her lip was split too.   
  
"R-Rory!"  
  
She would have blinked if she wasn't already squinting through swollen eyes. Reno was standing above her, framed in incredibly bright light, and he looked like he was about the throw up and burst into tears at the same time.  
  
"How ya doin' kid?" he asked, but his voice was incredibly distant.  
  
She felt her lip tremble. "My stomach hurts," her voice said, sounding small and pitiful.  
  
"It's okay, Rory…you're gonna be okay…" Reno said, but his quickening breath and his shaking hands seemed to belie that statement.   
Her lip trembled again, and with a small wail, she burst into sobs. "Reno, I don't wanna die…I don't wanna die…"   
Reno squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, letting a few tears slide down his cheeks. She fell against his chest, shaking with sobs. "Shh…shh…Rory, you're not gonna die…you're gonna be okay…" he trailed off as his voice cracked.   
"Then why won't you look at me when you say that?" Reno nearly choked, horror-stricken as Rory continued her sobbing. She realized she was going to die. His Rory, his innocent, realized she was about to go away from everything she had ever known. "Reno…"she sobbed. "I don't wanna leave you….I don't wanna leave…I wanna stay here….Don't let them make me go…"   
Reno held on to her, tightly as he could without hurting her. "Shh….Rory, shh…just…" He didn't know what to tell her to do. He shut his eyes, and quickly opened them again. Whenever he shut his eyes, he saw the horrors of reality. What would an innocent, a young girl with an imagination see? "Just close your eyes…imagine things are different…imagine things are okay…where do you wanna be? You can be anywhere in the world."   
"I…wanna be here with you." Sobs overtook her as she once again fell into Reno's arms.   
The nurse came in with the IV bag that held the sedative to send Rory into her dreamless sleep, before Reno was to pull the plug. "Hey Rory," he beseeched softly. "The nurse is gonna give you some medicine to help ya sleep, okay?"   
She sniffed. "Okay."   
"Anything, um, you wanna tell me, cause I think they'll make me leave while you're sleeping." Reno felt so sick. It had always hurt, lying to Rory, and now it hurt most of all.   
"I love ya."   
"I love ya too, kid." He squeezed her against him until she murmured a soft 'ow.'   
"Hey Reno?"   
"Yeah."   
"Since you're goin' out, do ya think you could scrounge up the gil to get me some ice cream from the cafeteria?"   
Reno's heart splintered. Her innocence… "Uh, sure."   
"Reno?"   
"Yeah."   
"You ain't gonna leave 'till I get to sleep, are ya?"   
He hugged her. "Wouldn't dream of it." She smiled and lay against him.   
"Night Reno."   
"G'night, Rory." He kissed her forehead. In a moment she yawned, and drifted to sleep.  
***  
It was like an electric shock, coming back into reality, and the two of them reeled together, nearly dropping the new weapons they held in their hands. Gabriel's was sheathed, and hers was not, so Rory got the first look at her knife, but even before she scooped it closer she could feel an air of familiarity about it. The blade was long, thin, and incredibly green. Dark to the point that it almost looked purple, but when she tried to check out how truly dark it was, a wave of sudden nausea swept over her, and she fell back against the pillar. Unable to explain, but almost positive the wave of sickness was coming from the blade itself, she lowered her eyes to the nearest thing- the hilt, and almost dropped the weapon yet again.  
The handle was simple, but beautiful. It had been engraved with something, not carved into but around, so the image actually rose up from the handle. A long stemmed rose curled around it, long thorns jutting out on either side, dripping blood. The blossom of the flower spread out into the opening where the blade would emerge. At the very bottom, one word was written:  
  
Rory.  
It was the switch blade her brother had given her, with a different blade, and she didn't even need to check her pocket to know that she wouldn't find anything. Shaking her head in amazement, she looked over to Gabriel, who was staring at his knife in what seemed like fear.  
"What's wrong?" she asked in a low voice.  
"Uh..." he pulled the sheath away from the handle a little bit, and showed her. Brimming low, around the exposed edges, danced little red flames along the bottom of the blade. He pulled it a little more, and not only was their fire their too, but it was wider, and a darker shade of red, flickering out but somehow not burning the leather sheath.  
"Huh..." Rory said, holding her green blade up a little higher for him to see.  
"Huh." Gabriel agreed, slowly licking his lips as he stared at it. A moment later, he needed to look away, and a sudden gag ripped through his mouth. "Ugh..." he muttered, holding his stomach, "what the hell is that thing?"   
"I don't know..." she admitted, and went to test the blade on her finger. Something stopped her, and she stared at it a moment longer, and then flicked it back into its sheath. "I wonder if were going to beat the others back."  
Gabriel shrugged at her, slowly holstering his knives on his belt. "I don't know," he admitted, "but if their stuff is weirder than this, I don't think it'll matter, cause they'll be fucking nuts by the time they arrive."  
Rory couldn't help but agree. 


	17. Sex, Lies, and Rock and Roll well, maybe...

The building was old, but that didn't fool Reno for a second. He had gotten to know the place quite well during his short residence in the town, and if the place was anything it was modern beyond belief. He had only ever been allowed a short glimpse in the back despite his close relationship with the owner, and what he'd seen reminded him both of a science room from high school, a meth lab, and metal shop. At least three fires were burning around the edges of the room, surrounding a stand of chemicals, which was almost directly touching what appeared to be the worlds largest lazer pen. That's all he'd managed to see before Neo had managed to shut the door, and hastily turn his attention away.  
  
Neo...  
  
The first time he had seen her, Reno remembered as he pushed open the front door to the shop, he'd almost shit himself. He'd thought that the masanume maniac had come back to finish off his job of skewering the Turks, but on a second glance had seen that it was indeed not Sephiroth, just a girl who came disturbingly close. Despite her age, which couldn't have been more than thirty, she had long flowing silver hair that reached her waist. Her skin was unwholesome pale, and her body... well, Reno would have loved to know, but the full suit of black leather armor she wore around even in the calmest and hottest of summers was quite a protection from the ravages of the eyes.  
  
She was standing at the front counter when he stepped into the shop, odd as it was the first time he could remember that happening. Usually she was busy in the back, and he'd hung around for hours before she had finally gotten around to answering the ultimately useless bell she kept next to the cash register on several past occasions. Oh well, if her services were anything, they were worth the wait. Neo Armory was widely known as the best weapon shop on the continent, after all... if you could afford its prices.  
  
"Hello Reno," she said in a distant, barely acknowledging voice. "What is it today? New knife? Some mako shrapnel hand grenades? We just got something special in, a wonderful little mixture of aphrodisiac and hallucinogen. We call it Sextacy."  
  
"Sextacy?" Reno asked, raising an eyebrow. "That's a weapon?"  
  
"Depends how big you are, I guess," Neo said, sounding about ten times creepier than she should have due to the fact that though she was obviously telling a joke, not a single change in her distant and monotone voice took place. "Besides, I'm a women of all trades, except the ones that involve corners of streets. Seriously though, what may I do for you?"  
  
"Well," said Reno, with a sudden pang in his conscience. He was beginning to feel like he was cheating on his wife just by being here, and he didn't even have a wife. Not that he knew of, anyway. With no real heart to finish the sentence he had begun, Reno pulled two things out from under his suits jacket- his Nightstick, and a piece of paper where instructions had been hastily jotted down in a runny pen. He handed them both to Neo, who looked at the paper is disgust.  
  
"Custom orders are usually readable, you know," she snorted, but shook her head. "No matter, this looks simple enough. We just got some really great wiring in that will take care of most of it. I can even give the whole thing a rethreading, if you want."   
"Um, thanks OK," said Reno, fighting against his urge. It was one thing to have a few simple extra features installed into his weapon so he wouldn't have a repeat of the happenings on Wutai mountain, but it was a whole different matter to completely gut the thing and cram a new circuitry set in there. A man had to have loyalty to something after all, and if it wasn't to his dick and his beat stick, what was it to? "When do you think you can have this done? I'm only in town for a few days."  
  
"Hm..." Neo peered at the instructions more closely, and then looked over at the nightstick. "This is pretty beat up, you know."  
  
"Yeah, well, so am I," he responded easily.  
  
"Right. Two... no, three days." She amended herself in mid sentence with a heavy sense of finality. "Is that fast enough?"  
  
Reno nodded, but he was barely listening to her words. Instead, he was searching her face, as something about her demeanor and words had seemed even stranger than usual, and with her, the usual was pretty strange. Her eyes kept flickering to the left wall, towards the east, even though there was no window in that wall, and thus nothing for her to be looking at. Maybe he was imagining things, but he just had this incredible feeling that she was pulling away from him even as the two simply stood there. On a whim, his eyes went down to her hands. "What happened there?" he asked with a dry voice, pointing at several nasty gashes that had been made in her palm.  
  
Neo quickly turned that hand upside down, hiding the wounds. "A blade in my band saw came loose."  
  
"And you caught it with your bare hand?" Reno said with a laugh, but not a loud one. It was less funny because he knew that there was no chance in hell that such a thing had happened, though he did believe that she would do exactly what he'd described if the situation arose. Neo didn't answer him, and instead simply looked again to the wall.  
  
In a flash, Reno understood. "You're going, aren't you?" he asked softly.  
  
Neo's eyes darted up to him, wide, and a denial died on her lips when she realized he hadn't named any facts she could contradict. Instead, she exhaled sharply, and rubbed her hands together as if cold. Reno noticed that despite looking wet, no blood transferred from the wound to the other hand. "Yes," she admitted, "in a few days... Ill finish your job first, don't worry. Wait... are you going too? Is that what you need this for?"  
  
For a moment, she seemed actually paranoid, as if the thought of someone else going heavily armed worried her. Reno took some time to look around her shop, and realized where some of his awkward feeling had come from. All of the junk was still out, the Katanas, the chakrams, the hand blades... but all the really high impact, classy, mortgage your house to afford stuff had disappeared from the shelves. Neo was going to Fort Condor, and she was going packing some serious weaponry. "No." Reno said, after his scan was done, not hiding the fact he knew exactly what she was talking about, and hoped she wouldn't know why.  
  
"But you feel it, don't you?" she asked urgently, and her voice actually seemed to rise a bit for once.   
  
"...yes," Reno said, only half lying. He had felt it. Not nearly as strong as Neo, obviously, but it was still there. An image in his mind, a gentle tug that sometimes wasn't so gentle, pulling him to the east and then to the south. He imagined the only reason it wasn't worse was that deep in his mind he knew he was going there anyway, and so did the pull, and thus only stuck around as a constant reminded. "Good luck," he added quickly, as if those words had any reverence at all. He wondered why they had popped into his head.  
  
"Thanks..." Neo said, and bit her lip. "I probably wont see you again," she admitted.  
  
"No." Reno agreed, "I guess not."  
  
"Good to know you." She said.  
  
"Ditto," he answered, and quickly threw some gil down on the counter. It wasn't quite enough to pay for the upgrades up front, but he figured where Neo was heading, she wouldn't care if she had money or not. Taking care not to meet her eyes, Reno turned on his heel, and left the shop.  
  
***  
  
"So where were you again?" Yuffie asked for what had to have been the twentieth time about Reno's side trip before they had started up the mountain again.   
  
"No where!" he answered, also for the twentieth. Looking for absolutely anything to take his ears, eyes, and other senses away from the bratty ninja walking beside him, Reno turned to Tseng. "So what exactly are we planning to do if tall, dark, and granite comes at us again?"  
  
"Which one?" Tseng asked.  
  
"Does it matter?" Reno replied.  
  
"No, I suppose not." Tseng shrugged. "We go up the mountain quieter."  
  
Reno stopped in his tracks. "Excuse me?"  
  
Tseng repeated his words exactly.  
  
"I believe," said Reno slowly, "that's how we try to stop them from coming at us again. What do we do if that brilliant plan- which I don't even think we have in effect right now anyway- happens to fail?"  
  
Once again, Tseng shrugged. "We always think of something," he said.  
  
And besides for a few dark spots on the record of the Turks, that was reasonably true. The dark spots being, notably, the sudden disappearance of Vincent Valentine, the death of Tseng, and of course their *first* trip up the mountain, the Turks had displayed ingenuity and luck right up there with ruthlessness and aim.   
  
"Well..." Reno said, and trailed off, looking for something to argue about. "Didn't you ask anyone in the village if they knew how to deal with them?"  
  
"Oh yeah," Yuffie was back in Reno's ears again, throwing herself head first into his conversation with Tseng, "we'll just calmly explain how we're planning to defile their sacred land, and we'd like to know how to get past the forces of God trying to stop us from doing so. Brilliant."  
  
Reno shot the Wutain a smoldering look, but Tseng spoke again before he could take a shot back. "I already said we aren't going to defile anything, OK?" he demanded, and when Yuffie nodded, he spoke again. "Good. Now, if you please, I really would like to at least attempt the plan of not talking loud enough to draw the god damn things again, so I would like to hereby request that each and every one of you shut the hell up."  
  
And they did, with varying degrees of compliance. Reno and Yuffie resigned themselves to simply use the time to think of something insulting they could throw at each other, while Rude barely talked anyway, but Elena quickly developed the need to scratch her palm absently in the place of rambling on. They went on that way in silence for a good distance, and had just about reached the spot where the monsters had first appeared when the first droplets of rain started to splatter against the ground.  
  
The rain started slow, a gentle mist you would expect of spring, but quickly developed into the type of downpour you would be surprised at on an island in monsoon season. Suddenly damp, cold, and blinded, Yuffie decided at this point that there really was no need to hold up Tseng's order about keep quiet. "*Now* do you believe the gods are against us!?" she demanded, though in all honesty she wasn't even sure if the others were in hearing distance.  
  
At the very least, Reno was, because a moment later she saw a glimpse of his red hair through the downpour of the rain, and though she couldn't see his face she imagined it was glaring at her. It disappeared just as quickly as it had popped into view, and relieved that she was still relatively close to the group, Yuffie let out a momentary sigh of relief. The last few puffs of air had just escaped when a pale hand popped out of nowhere and seized her wrist in an iron grip.  
  
Years of built in instinct took over, and with one violent move Yuffie grabbed the wrist, wrenched it forward, and threw a wild knee into what was very likely the center of the wrist's owner. She was rewarded with a wet thud sound, and with a sudden gasp her assailant was down on the now incredibly muddy mountain path. She fumbled for her chakram while backing away from it, in case it as going to leap at her. When it made no such movement, and she had her weapons safely drawn, she peered closer.   
  
Reno lay in the mud, staring up absently at the sky.  
  
"Oh god!" Yuffie said, feeling bad- but not too bad, of course- for what she had done, she quickly knelt by Reno. "Sorry about that, you scared the hell out of me."  
  
For a long time, Reno ignored her, staring up unblinkingly into the sky. And then, finally, he responded.  
  
He blinked.  
  
"What the hell are you doing?" Yuffie demanded.  
  
"...slowly tracing the steps of my life that led my to lying with a bruised rib cage and a dirty back in pelting rain with a sawed off bimbo hovering over me." Reno answered, and slowly sat up, holding his ribs. "God..."  
  
"Why did you sneak up on me like that?" she asked, trying to turn the situation around by hitting him with an accusation.  
  
"...Tseng picked out a place for shelter about an eighth of a mile back," Reno said, "and you were too fucking stupid to look around and kept plowing forward. Thus, I came to get you."  
  
"...oh." Yuffie said, and if the stinging rain hadn't been seriously impairing Reno's vision he would have seen her wince. "Well, where is it?"  
  
With a sigh, Reno rolled to his feet, and shot the ninja a dark look, which she responded to with her best act of innocence. Rolling his eyes, the Turk began to stumble back down the path, never looking back at her, but going slow enough so she could definitely keep up.  
  
Huh, Yuffie thought as she trudged along, his butt looks kind of good wet.  
  
Huh...  
  
***  
  
The 'shelter', as Reno had had the gall to call it, was what most people would recognize as trees. A patch of trees. And while the dark forest that grew out of the side of the mountain did a fairly good job at protecting from the rain and limiting visibility of each other as they went to split up into little individual bedrooms, it did absolutely nothing about the wind and the cold, and so it was with much anger and sulking that Yuffie stormed off into the woods to do a good deal of walking before she laid down to sleep.  
  
Eventually, as much of her walks ended up doing, this one slowly curved around in a circle, and after about twenty minutes she began to approach the same area that she had started from. It was getting darker by the second, and wondering why the hell they had left at this point in the day anyway Yuffie began to trip on the now unseen floor of the forest on her way back towards the small fire that Rude had built, using his sun glasses to amplify the last bits of sun that were still in the sky onto a pile of old leaves. Reno had made some sort of boy scouts crack, only to be stared down by Rude's unusually uncovered eyes.  
  
After Yuffie bumped into what had to have been her ninth log in the last three minutes, she let out a frustrated growl and kicked at it as it rolled away- and realized instantly that something was wrong. First of all, logs don't squish that easily around a foot. Second, they don't make a gasping, moaning sound, and curl up clutching their stomachs. For the second time that day, Yuffie peered at the ground, and saw Reno looking up at her, though this time he was in considerably more pain.  
  
"Oh *god*..." Yuffie moaned, and knelt down by him.  
  
"What the hell is wrong with you!?" he snarled, when he finally got his breath back. "So far you've attacked me while I was trying to lead you out of the rain, when I was playing cards in a bar, and now when I'm sleeping! Do I have a big sign written on my face that reads 'insert foot here' or something!?"  
  
"...you're surprisingly articulate for being sleeping." Yuffie said, peering closer at him.  
  
"OK, OK, so I wasn't sleeping." Reno admitted, "That doesn't men you should come up and wedge your boot into my rib cage."  
  
"Well... yeah." Yuffie relented. "OK. But what the hell were you doing?" Her eyes twitched involuntarily downward, betraying her mind. Reno snorted.  
  
"Hah hah," he muttered, "if you must know, I was wondering where the hell my sister is right now. I think its become pretty obvious there is more to picking up these little knives or whatever than Aeris told us, and quite frankly, I don't think Rory and that little dude she went with could take care of something as big as a rock monster."  
  
Yuffie was silent. She had no idea that Reno even had those sorts of though, though she guessed she should have assumed it. After all, he was as human being. A truly warped, weird, and altogether disconcerting human being, but a human being.  
  
"Its cold," she said suddenly.  
  
"Uh... yes." Reno agreed. "It is."  
  
Yuffie rolled her eyes. Sure she wasn't the most blatant person in the world, but she hated it when guys couldn't pick up on subtlety. "I meant its *cold*," she said, stressing the words appropriately. Suddenly interested, Reno looked up at her.  
  
"You mean, cold, cold?" he asked. "As in the good kind of cold?"  
  
With a growl, Yuffie promptly smacked Reno on the arm. "No you pervert," she snarled, "I meant your supposed to put your arm around me so I can steal your body warmth and get some sleep!"  
  
Reno's face went blank.   
  
"...yes you idiot," Yuffie said, revealing her sarcasm. "I meant the good kind of cold."  
  
"Oh, uh..." Reno sat up where he lay, and looked around, as if he expected a camera crew and a horde of police officers to appear out of nowhere. "Good?"  
  
"Good." Yuffie confirmed, quickly running her fingers down his arm. What the hell, she thought, he was cute, he was sad, and she was cold. Unless.. suddenly, she paused, and Reno glanced up in confusion. "You can't tell anyone, of course."  
  
"Well... duh." Reno muttered, as if the mere thought of letting Rude know about this was offensive. With a small smile, Yuffie pulled one of his arms around her, and leaned down.  
  
***  
  
"Dude," Reno muttered, early the next morning while the sun was barely peaking off the ground to do its work drying the ground. "I slept with Yuffie."  
  
Rude, who had been poking at the dead embers of the fire he'd made with a particularly large stick, suddenly froze. For some reason or another he'd had his glasses on even at this time, and he promptly pulled them off. His eyes were wide as they focused on Reno, and then he suddenly shook his head. "Reno," he said slowly, like you'd talk to a child who had just stolen some cookies, "I've been awake for fifteen minutes. That is not a fifteen minutes into the day topic. In fact, that's not an any time of the day topic."  
  
"Oh come on man," Reno bartered him, "we are the only people in the world lined up to save it from being destroyed. Thus, were all very, very dead. And I mean really dead. The kind of dead where no one is left to bury you. So why *not* do it?"  
  
"...good point." Rude muttered. "And speaking of which, we should get up and get going. Tseng and Elena already went on ahead, and the ninja brat... well, you'd know more about that than me at this point, but I'm assuming she's not a late sleeper with the way she bounces around all the time." Rude paused, though Reno wasn't sure if it was in contemplation or a silent dread of starting walking this soon after waking up. "...does she bounce around all the time?" he asked suddenly.  
  
"Haha," Reno snorted, and then groaned anew as he pushed himself to his feet. He didn't care how young the rest of him was, his knees were fifty and aging quick. That's what happens when you spend most of your life running on some uncomfortable surface or diving out of windows. "Honestly, I hope Yuff stays behind. The last thing we need is even more bullshit about sacred lands."  
  
"Huh..." Rude said slowly. "Maybe they are sacred. Not that we aren't going on them anyway," he added quickly, as Reno gave him a dark look, "but still. I'm just saying you probably shouldn't spit or anything when we get there. There's only so many chances that are smart to take."  
  
Yeah, yeah, Reno said, but only to himself, as the two began to walk out of the woods and onto the mountain path, which was now essentially a strip of pure mud miles long. Tseng and Elena had apparently not made much progress, as they were still in sight, and Reno and Rude hustled to keep up, splattering mud behind them. Honestly, they weren't in as much of a hurry to catch up with the others as they were to put a distance between them and Yuffie.   
  
They caught up with Tseng and Elena easily enough, but they did so silently, making an actual effort to put Tseng's silence plan into effect. After all, despite the faithful word's of their leader about their ability to adapt under pressure, none of them were in a hurry to run once again into those rock monsters.   
  
Either the plan worked, or the monsters were simply too far to get to them with their big charging pain routine, but either way the effect was the same. Only an hour of walking through the mud later and they arrived at a large clearing surrounded by stones, where the path suddenly ended. Many tourists and travelers had taken the logical assumption that the land surrounded by stones was in fact the sacred area, and encouraged that belief, as it was a widespread city amusement to see travelers going home with clippings of grass that was simply grown from normal dirt.  
  
No, the clearing was not the holy land. It was simply the arrow pointing the way. The rocks, while forming a circle in the whole, individually were all turned in one direction, off to the right of the path. Once Tseng, who had managed to weasel the secret of the stones out of a drunk the morning before, explained this to them, and pointed it out, they quickly followed the way for only a short walk, until they reached a large dropout off the mountain, and there was nothing left to walk on save air. Twenty feet below, stretching out in front of them, was the dark green holy lands of Wutai.  
  
"Um..." Reno blinked. "I may be stating the obvious here, but we are on a slightly different level of gravity here, than that is there. How the hell are we supposed to get down?"  
  
A voice came from behind him, absolutely saturated with stubborn anger. "You aren't," it insisted, "I already told you that its sacred land."  
  
They turned around and there stood Yuffie, perched on a particularly large rock, staring down at them disapprovingly. Her clothes were surpassingly devoid of mud considering the only way to get here was straight up a soaked dirt path, and she cast a long shadow on them from her perch. They stared up at her, at a momentary loss for words, as the unspoken challenge hung in the air.  
  
And then, a split second later, the rock on which Yuffie was standing exploded.  
  
The young ninja dropped hard from her stand, hitting the dirt and rolling to the side as chunks of debris and a cloud of dust washed over her. Looming above, coming upon them silently in a way that none could guess, was one of the rock monsters, who had just destroyed Yuffie's seat with a single backhand of its mammoth arm. The Turks began to back up instinctively and reach for their weapons, but they remembered from earlier exactly how effective bullets were, and they quickly ran out of cliff to back up on. Teetering on the edge, Tseng looked from the monster, to the land beneath, to Yuffie, then back to the land.  
  
"Grab her," he hissed, "and aim for the high grass."  
  
And with that, Tseng took another step backwards, taking himself smoothly off the side of the rock. Elena screamed and turned to see him fall, and the cry only died on her lips when she saw him slam into a thick matted pad of plants, winded but obviously alive. Taking a deep breath, she followed.  
  
Reno and Rude went to grab Yuffie at the same time, bumping into each other. The two shared a quick look, Rude nodded at Reno, and turned to join both Tseng and Elena in their plunge. Moving as fast as he could to avoid the towering granite behemoth, Reno scooped up Yuffie in his arms and took a running leap off of the incline.  
  
The fall was an odd sensation. On one hand, it was sort of enlightening, just free falling, and knowing that there was nothing that he could do to change his current situation sure took a load off. On the other hand, it was one of the scariest and stupidest things that Reno had ever done, simultaneously.  
  
There was a dull thud as he hit the grass. He felt the air drive out of his lungs, but thankfully didn't feel his lungs begin to launch its way out of its throat. He lay on the ground for a moment, breathing hard, and then realized he was still holding Yuffie. He rolled her off him and sighed, one more death defying stunt he'd pulled and lived through. Even worse knees in the morning.  
  
He took his sweet time getting up, and felt he had earned it. Being heroic took a lot out of him, especially when it was followed by a twenty foot plummet with nothing to break his fall but some foliage covered grass. When he finally did get up, he saw that Yuffie was stirring quite actively, and leaned over her.  
  
"I think big charcoal up there swept you off your feet," he said with a small smirk.  
  
"Ugh." Yuffie said elegantly, and Reno noticed that she was looking around instead of at him, and probably wasn't speaking of her current brow beaten situation. "We shouldn't be here." She sighed. "This is bad."  
  
Reno sighed and got to his feet, simply because it would be a position that would get him away from her quicker. "You need to lay off on this sacred land stuff. It isn't."  
  
"Yes it is!" said Yuffie, gathering the energy to sit up just to yell at him. Suddenly, a large leather sack landed right beside her, and she turned to see the thrower- Tseng, holding a strange thin stick in his hands.  
  
"Actually," he said, "it isn't."  
  
"What...?" Yuffie asked, and instantly overwhelmed by curiosity, reached into the bag. She felt an odd sensation, as if she had just managed not to touch something that she physically should have, and then her fingers touched something hard, and incredibly cold. Instantly she pulled it out, revealing a glittering crystal ring, that looked like it had been carved from diamonds themselves. Tentatively she ran her finger down the edge of it, and it split the skin easier than anything shed ever seen before. Even as she popped her bloody finger into her mouth in surprise, she stared at the chakram in amazement.  
  
"See?" Tseng said, catching her look. "Its just a holding place for these weapons. Reno?" he tacked that last part off as he glanced to the right, where Reno was eyeing the bag in what seemed to be very uncharacteristic nervousness. "Something wrong?"  
  
"Er, no," said Reno, kneeling by it and slowly reaching inside. He groped for a bit, before dipping down to the very bottom, and felt his finger tips bounce against something new. He quickly wrapped his hand around it, feeling like he recognized the material of the rounded weapon, and promptly pulled it out, before almost dropping it.  
  
It was his Nightstick.   
  
"What the hell?" Yuffie asked, looking over at him. "How did that get in the bag?"  
  
Reno stared at it closely in confusion. It was almost identical to the weapon he'd used for the last half a decade, but it felt somewhat differently weighted. Then it came to him in a flash- the modifications he'd instructed Neo to do, they were finished, and they were now a part of it. "I, um, don't know..." he fumbled, "I left it at a weapons shop to get juiced up. And now... its here," he finished lamely.  
  
Yuffie gave him a sly look. "Didn't go anywhere, huh?" she taunted.  
  
Reno paused. "So much for your holy lands!" he snapped back.  
  
"Really?" Yuffie asked slowly, an obvious cover for just thinking quickly of something to save her side of the argument. Suddenly it came to her. "I think your wrong. Aeris just said these were made by the planet, she didn't say what for. I think they were meant to defend the world, and that's why they're here- holy relics!" Suddenly, she stopped. "Though it doesn't seem likely you've been carrying a holy relic around for a few years without being struck down," she admitted.  
  
"Hah." Reno snarled, and quickly turned the bag upside down. Nothing else fell out, and when he looked up at Tseng for explanation, his mentor simply shrugged. "Rude and Elena already got theirs. This stick is mine, I guess..." Tseng took a few practice swings with it, and then on a whim, pulled each side away from each other. A snap rang out, and they pulled apart, pulling a long wire string tight between them. A garrot wire.  
  
"Now this I like..." he admitted, snapping the two sides back together. It seemed extremely fitting.  
  
As he spoke, Rude was rounded a corner around a rock and walked over to them. Reno looked him over, and cocked an eyebrow in question, to which Rude simply shrugged. "Did you know," he asked, sounding distant, "that your undershirt has about nine holes in it."  
  
"Yeah..." Reno said absently, and a second later his eyes went wide. "Wait! You're kidding!"  
  
Rude smirked. "New glasses," he explained. "Ray Bans. I wonder how the powers at be knew what style of glasses I wore two thousand years before I was born."  
  
His tone seemed to clearly dismiss the concept of these weapons being magical and mystical gifts, though he was clearly impressed with the object that he had received. Reno was just about to ask what happened to Elena when he was cut off with a violent boom. He heard Tseng curse, and spun quickly around to see the source of the noise.  
  
The rock monster, which he'd thought they had left easily behind, was standing ten feet behind him. On its feet. After an eight yard vertical drop onto stone. Quickly, Reno fumbled with his new and improved nightstick, and rose it to fire, hoping these new features worked as well as he'd designed them to.  
  
His fire was held at bay as a small click sounded to his left, and he felt something very much like shock waves shove his arm to the left. There was a defeaning sound of stone shattering, and the air was suddenly filled with dust in a twenty foot circle, in which Yuffie, Reno, and the rest of the Turks were included. When it cleared, there was a small pile of pebbles where the stone monster had been.  
  
"Huh."  
  
The entire group looked, as one, to their left. Elena stood their, cradling a pistol small enough that it looked like an especially minuscule Derringer. Small wisps of smoke were escaping from its tip, and it was still aimed in the general area where the monster had stood. Her eyes were wide in shock as she stared at her hand, and the weapon contained therein.  
  
'Well." Reno said. "I guess we know what Santa Claus brought you for Christmas." 


	18. Well Son of A Um, Hojo

"Did I mention," Zack said, sounding even more nauseous than he had a few minutes ago, "that I hate water?"   
  
The two of them were wading through water that was coming up to the point of their knees, and it was becoming even more of a concern with each passing second. There was something unnatural about the speed it was rising, and neither of them had any real idea how much longer it would be until they got to the well Aeris had told them of, limited because the only light they had was supplied by the dimly flickering piece of wood that Zack had managed to grab before the earlier fires had fully gone out  
  
That problem, at least, they hoped to change.  
  
The maintenance room was exactly what you'd expect besides for the fact there was a foot and a half of water filling the bottom of it. Mops floated around their waists, along with bottles of cleaning solvent, a few tools, and of course the ever present smell of ammonia. Rufus especially seemed to notice this, as every time he breathed in his nostrils flared and his eyes would water just a little bit more. Nonetheless, he surged in front of the Gonganan, half swimming his way up to a row of electrical breakers that was thankfully still above the water.   
  
"God I hope this isn't locked..." he muttered, and tried to open it. There was a mechanical click, and the door pulled away from the wall. He threw it open the rest of the way triumphantly, and instantly began to turn every switch inside to the left instead of the right, apparently heedless of the fact his hand was soaking wet. That was something Zack had begun to notice about Rufus, his lack of fear of dying. While he did move out of the way of things that would obviously kill him, he didn't seem hung up on the little threats, as if he knew something specific would happen before he died.  
  
I wonder, thought Zack, if that's why he ended up dead the first time.  
  
A mechanical hum started in the middle of his thought, barely hearable in the distance, but rapidly increasing in volume as it stretched across a chain of wires into rooms that were progressively closer to them. Finally the hum struck home, and a series of blue, gloomy lights lit up all around them. For a moment, Zack almost regretted the move, as he could now see better than ever his waiting watery death, but he forcibly shoved those thoughts aside. They weren't helping, and hell, the added visibility would just get them in and out of there faster. He pretended not to notice the water was now distinctly above his knee cap.  
  
They moved on, Rufus still leading the way, though Zack wasn't entirely sure the man had ever truly visited this place during his reign as president. Too damn good to visit the common folk, he guessed. Their progress was hindered by dozens of floating objects in every room, as apparently the Shinra construction crew didn't believe in metal, and nearly all the furniture bobbed up and down like a cork. Thus, it took longer than either of them would have liked to get through the office portion of the base, and get to the machinery. By that time, the water was halfway up their thighs.  
  
The room in which the machinery was located was just that- one single, long stretching room, filled with ghastly and dark looking towering behemoths of steel and rusted iron. The emergency lights did nothing to detriment the cemetery like scope of the room, and after all- it was close enough to a cemetery in its own right. A slowly rusting monument to the Shinra of the past, where they didn't just talk about things and clean shit up- they'd gotten shit done. Sure, in the end, it had almost destroyed the planet, but before that... business had been taken care of.  
  
Zack had voiced concern that the machines would short circuit, and considering the entire compounds floor was just a massive conductor, would fry them like shrimp in less than a second. Rufus had reassured him, rather scornfully, that it was an underwater compound- and of course they had safe guarded against such a thing. Zack had asked a follow up question about whether or not they had safe guarded against fire spewing mutants, and Rufus had simply clammed up and continued wading, using handles and pipes emitting from the machines to speed up progress.  
  
"Well..." Rufus said, after what seemed like an eternally slow trek of walking, "this is where she said."  
  
The two of them looked around, and saw nothing that would indicate a massive hole beneath them, and neither was willing to just walk around and use their only indication as the moment when they suddenly went dropping a hundred feet straight down. It had, of course, been an unspoken fear that the well had been completely filled with water, which means they would either need to find some sort of scuba gear- which, Rufus had assured him, would not exist in the compound- or turn around and go home in disgust, to calmly await the end of the world.   
  
Instead of falling, however, they instead managed to successively slam their foot into the hole. If that didn't make any sense to you reading it, let me explain- they slammed their feet into a large, raised, concrete ring, topped with a massive circular valve. Muttering curses from entirely different cultures, they braved the bottom depth of the water for a few minutes to peer closer at the structure, and were relieved to see that the top was only a few inches below the surface of the pale water.  
  
"I just thought of something..." Zack said slowly.  
  
"Hm?" Rufus asked idly, testing the strength of the valve with a quick twist. It held tight.  
  
"When we open this, wont it fill with water?" he asked.  
  
"Yes." Rufus said, with a shrug. Zack froze.  
  
"Then what the hell are we doing this for?" he said, panicked.  
  
"Because..." Rufus said, as if it should be obvious, "its wide enough that it will take quite a while to completely fill. By the time it takes us to get to the bottom, it should barely be above our heads. If these things were looking for are right below the surface, we have no problem."  
  
"Right..." said Zack, not even close to convinced. "And if your obviously well researched calculation, you know, the one you just pulled out of thin air, is wrong, then what?"  
  
"Then," said Rufus, indicating for Zack to give him a hand with the valve, "we die."  
  
"Ah," said the Gonganan, and together the two of them twisted with all their might, managing to defeat both the air vacuum, the water pressure, and the good old fashioned rust enough to pry the heavy lid from the top of the well. Instantly the few inches of water that remained above the top dropped down, and began to pour in from all sides, but Zack saw that Rufus was right- they would have time, albeit not much, to do what they needed to do.  
  
The two shared a long look, wasting precious second as liquid went pouring into the hole. "Well," they said, not exactly together, but close enough that it didn't matter. They were sharing the same thought:  
  
After you.  
  
"You know..." Rufus said slowly, after a while. "You probably have about twenty pounds on me. If you fell on me, I would fall a lot more than you would if the tables were turned."  
  
Zack snorted. "So?" he snapped, "those twenty pounds are muscle that's going to *stop* me from falling down, unlike you, who will probably slip instantly."  
  
They had a momentary standoff, and then stared back into the hole. Off to the side of the concrete drop, there seemed to be a ladder built straight into the wall, though the water was cascading right down on top of it. Muscles or not, this was going to be one hell of an unpleasant trip down.   
  
"How about we arm wrestle for it?" Zack suggested mildly.  
  
"Yeah..." Rufus agreed, "or not. How about we argue accounting irregularities?"  
  
Zack gave him a blank look, not really sure if he was kidding or not. However, he figured that all the time they were talking like this was just giving him more water he was going to have to work through, so he might as well just show up Rufus. Without another word he grabbed the edge of the valve and swung himself down, letting go and easily catching the ladder before he plummeted thirty or so yards. He let out a low groan as his stomach slammed into the lower bars, but instantly began his slippery descent as water poured down onto his head. At least Rufus would act as a block for that...  
  
Ten quick rungs down, Zack realized the water wasn't being blocked. He looked up, and though the scene was blurred from the water cascading into his eyes, he saw that Rufus had not yet left the upper level. "Come on!" he yelled, "we can't waste any time!"  
  
Rufus suddenly jerked in surprise, and looked around wide eyed, before locked in on Zack. How the man had forgotten he was there in only a minute was beyond the Gonganan, but Rufus seemed genuinely surprised to see him, not regaining his composure nearly as fast as he usually did. "You're right," he said simply, an odd- and quite disturbing- look coming into his eyes. "We can't."  
  
And with that, he stepped over the edge.  
  
Zack let out a cry as Rufus plummeted, arms flailing, past him like some sort of white, wet ballistic missile, slowly slanting down towards the wall. Just when he thought his companion was going to slam into the wall and rupture like an over ripe fruit, his descent suddenly stopped, punctuated only by a sickening sounding thump and a barely restrained growl of pain from Rufus. Theatrics nowithsanding, Rufus had just topped Zack's entry into the tube by about thirty rungs of the ladder, and now *Zack* was the one blocking the water. It was at one hell of a price though... at the speed Rufus had been going when he had snagged the ladder, Zack would be genuinely surprised if he had any functioning ligaments left.  
  
However, on the steady and cautious trip downward, it soon became apparently the distance difference wasn't going to last long. Rufus was going unnaturally slow, and they were only about halfway down (it seemed to Zack that they had gone up and down the total distance about six times, but that's besides the point) when Zack caught up to Rufus, and finally heard the deep, strained breathing over the sound of the falling water.  
  
"Hey man," he asked worriedly, "you OK?"  
  
"...fine..." Rufus grunted out slowly, and went to go another rung down. His foot slipped on the slick metal, and he almost dropped, managing to regain his footing a second before he fell.  
  
"What the hell did you jump like that for?" Zack asked, genuinely wondering. He'd had Rufus pegged for unbalanced, sure, but suicidal?  
  
"...seemed like a good idea at the time..." Rufus muttered, and then burst out in a round of coughing.  
  
"Jesus Christ!" Zack snarled, slowly stepping onto the side of the ladder rungs and walking down them that way so he was level with Rufus. "Are you fucking insane?"  
  
For a moment, Rufus gave him a blank look. "I'm sorry?" he said, "did we just meet a few seconds ago?"  
  
And with that, he left go of the rungs.  
  
Twenty feet down, there was a splash of water, as Rufus hit the ever growing swimming pool that was developing at the bottom of the tunnel. Rolling his eyes, Zack followed him down, free falling all the way before hitting the water. With every foot down they'd gone, the lights had been less and less frequent, and now they were back once again to a dull and shimmering reflection being their only source of illumination. They used it the best they could to look around, and saw... absolutely nothing.  
  
"OK..." said Zack slowly, kicking his legs to stay floating. "And now what?"  
  
For a moment, even Rufus seemed lost. "Well..." he said, "now we dig."  
  
This was easier said than done, as the water had risen a good eight feet from the surface of sand and mud, and it wasn't exactly like they had brought a steam shovel along with them. Instead, they took turns diving down, Rufus with chilled calmness, and Zack with barely contained panic, to probe into the ground beneath them. Every time they came up empty handed, and every time the water just used the delay caused by their failures to get deeper and deeper. Twenty minutes later, Zack's nerves were frayed to the end, and he suddenly screamed in frustration. "This isn't fucking possible! I don't know if you have a few extra lungs, but I don't, and I can't hold enough air to get these damn things!"  
  
At his words, Rufus's eyes suddenly lit up, and he quickly pulled off his long white coat. He stretched the sleeve out from the body of the jacket, and held it out to Zack. "Cut it," he said, "right at the seam."  
  
Not really having the energy or the time to argue, Zack hefted his sword and brought it down, severing fabric from fabric. As soon as he did, Rufus held out the other sleeve, which he cut in turn. Instantly Rufus set to tying the end of both tubes of fabric into knots, and Zack began to see his plan. Displaying the ingenuity of an especially over the top Magiver episode, Rufus blew air into each of the sleeves, then held the ends tightly in his fist, trapping the oxygen inside.  
  
"You know," he said, "if this doesn't work, we're screwed."  
  
Zack snorted. "We've been screwed from the start. We might as find out how bad so we can get out of here, one way or another."  
  
Rufus seemed to agree with that, but still seemed trouble. "This is the second jacket I've lost in, like, two days." He muttered.  
  
"Yeah, well, once again..." Zack said in exasperation. "This fails, we die, the jacket isn't that important. Besides, chicks go for the sleeveless look."  
  
"Right," said Rufus, and disappeared beneath the water, disappearing from view almost immediately. Zack distracted himself from the water all around him by counting the seconds that his companion had been submerged, mental time keeping being a skill that had been stressed during Soldier training. Forty seconds was the average holding time for breath, less when you were exerting yourself by swimming under water. Forty seconds passed and no sign of Rufus, and there was no way those little air pockets could have held more than a single full breath. Eighty seconds... Zack began to get worried. Between digging, swimming, and rising back to the top... well, this was too long. Taking a deep breath of his own, Zack plunged beneath the water, to see what was keeping Rufus...  
  
...only to see that he wasn't there. Startled, Zack began to swim in circles, hoping to hit something solid that would be Rufus. His hands worked along the bottom, horror filling him, as he searched for a body. Instead, he felt something hard, like metal, and clasped his hands around it. It was heavy- maybe Rufus' shotgun, Zack didn't know if he'd left it on the upper level or not. It was already soaked and therefore useless- but seemed to have a bit of buoyancy to it as Zack kicked upwards, floating to the top.  
  
Rufus was waiting for him on the surface of the water, looking completely exhausted. "Couldn't," he gasped, taking huge inhaling breaths, trying to restore some of the usual lack of color to his now bright red face, "find... them..." he choked once, and coughed up a bit of water.  
  
"That's OK..." said Zack, sudden revelation striking him as he grabbed a rung of the ladder and used it to aid in hauling his load to the surface. It was no shotgun. Instead it was a dark black chest, covered in sand and grit, and Zack had hold of its handle. "I could." Rufus' eyes widened.   
  
"Son of a bitch..." he muttered, and grabbed the handle on the other end. Together they hauled it up the ladder, step by step, agonizingly slow as they were very aware that the water in the tunnel was pretty much keeping up with them in their ascent. When they finally reached the top, they simply rolled over the top of the valve and let the chest sink to the level floor- which, they noticed in considerable horror, now had about four and a half feet of water over it. They knew that they were working on limited time, but they felt they owed themselves a quick break, which consisted mainly of bobbing in the water and taking long, deep, and painful breaths. The only real signal they had to keep going was when they both pressed their feet to the ground, and realized that the water was now up to their armpits.  
  
"We aren't going to be able to hold this thing and swim for more than a few feet, you know..." Rufus said slowly.  
  
"Yeah." Zack agreed. "So we better get moving while we can still touch the floor."  
  
And so they did, one hand on each side of the chest, and running in awkward, water logged steps back past the machinery room, and into the offices, which actually caused more hopelessness in them than ever before. They could see the elevator out in the distance, but it was more than a hundred yards away, and already they had to breath on the higher points in their bounding steps, because the lower had their mouths and noses submerged. Cursing, they shoved onward, past the broken pipe that had started all of this to begin with, where the water was deeper than ever.  
  
They broke into an all out swim, barely keeping above the water with the added weight of the crate holding them down. If they'd thought about it, they would have taken the contents out earlier and left the extra weight behind, but now- and possibly even then- they simply didn't have time for it. The final stretch of hallway that led to the hallway was the narrowest of them all, barely going above their heads when they had first walked in. Only about six inches of open space was showing above the water when they first entered, and even that was disappearing fast.  
  
With a final burst of energy they made it to the elevator, and praying to very different Gods that it would be able to rise filled with water- the floor, after all, was just a hole filled sheet of metal. With only a few inches of air left, they shoved the crate onto it, and slid in themselves. Rufus made a diving leap for the lever and shoved it upwards as the last of their breathing space disappeared, and with a slow groaning whine the machination began to go skywards.  
  
Come on, come on, Zack prayed with his eyes closed tight, don't let me drown, Jesus don't let me drown... he didn't even both to look to see if the water was draining out the bottom or not before leaping upwards for air- after all, he would know in a minute anyway- and for a moment despair hit him as he felt nothing but freezing water grace his lips- and then in a feeling that was probably very much like being born, warm welcoming air, which he sucked in greedily.   
  
It took the entire trip upwards for the water to drain entirely from the transport, and that trip was filled with Rufus and Zack taking amazingly deep breaths, choking on water, gagging, and then repeating. They didn't care that each breath brought on a horrible fit of coughing, it was *air*, damnit, something they had very nearly been cut off from forever. With a groan, Zack leaned back against the metal wall of the elevator, and his eyes went to the chest.  
  
"You know what would suck?" he said weakly.  
  
"Everything we just did?" Rufus answered.  
  
"No..." Zack said. "If that just contained some construction equipment or something."  
  
Rufus' eyes went wide in horror, and without answering him, he dove at the chest, frantically pawing to get it open to see if they had just risked their lives for absolutely nothing. What he saw on the inside, thank Bahumat, assured him that they had not.  
  
"Wow..." Zack said, peering into the chest, who's contents were entirely dry. It contained two items one of which Zack had seen before- the Ultima Weapon. Gawking at it, he slowly pulled it from the chest, admiring the bright and glittering blue crystal that looked as fragile as glass, but- as he'd been told in Soldier training- could cut diamond like a piece of cheese.  
  
Rufus was slightly less impressed with the reward for his efforts. "What the hell is this?" he asked quietly, staring at the item in his hand, and then turned to Zack. "What the hell is this?" he repeated. Zack looked over, tearing his eyes from his own weapon, and blinked.  
  
"Uh..." he said. "I have no idea."  
  
Rufus stared at him, exhausted anger in his eyes.  
  
"Well..." he muttered, placing the small object in the inside pocket of his ripped jacket. "That's just fucking brilliant." 


	19. You have a WHAT?

"So..." Cid said slowly, in the tone and intonation of a man who wanted desperately to brooch a subject but really didn't know how to do it. Finally, he went with his old standby, and simply blurted it out. "Who's the mom?"  
  
"Cid!" Tifa hissed at him, kicking him sharply in the leg, but he simply gave her an exasperated look. "Oh *what*!?" he asked. "Its probably not someone we know!"  
  
"Actually..." Reeve said, and *his* tone and intonation was of someone who was really lying but didn't really mind if people realized it, since the fact that he was lying would make his point nicely in itself, "it isn't. And that's why there really isn't any need for you to know. No offense, of course."  
  
"None taken." Cid snorted, and then went back to dejectedly leafing through an amazingly out dated magazine.  
  
The five of them were sitting quietly in an all white room while men and women dressed in light blue outfits scurried around busily, carrying trays of food and medicine. A few of them were in white, large and burly men who looked like they could take on the best of the world's bouncers, equipped with an arsenal that wasn't all that typical- a single syringe, and a backpack filled with reinforced, double stitched white jackets. Even Cloud shrunk backwards when they walked past, less in fear of the men themselves than in fear of the things they did. The tag on their shirt pockets that simply red 'St. Mary's' was less than reassuring.  
  
Especially considering the two words that were missing from the name of the institution- Mental Hospital.  
  
They were in the waiting room of St. Mary's Mental Hospital, though that wasn't the official name. The official name was something with about six unnecessary words and about thirty unnecessary presumptions, so even someone as politically correct as Tifa preferred to simply refer to it as exactly what it was- a Mental Hospital. Which they were in. And feeling quite uncomfortable, at that.  
  
"Maybe you should tell us the story," Tifa said softly, putting a comforting hand on Reeve's shoulder even though she herself had no idea why, "before we go in and talk to him. I wouldn't want to say anything..."  
  
"Wrong?" Reeve supplied, and then sighed despite his attempt at a calm facade. "Well, yes, I guess that's best. There really isn't that much to tell. He's fifteen, he came in here when he was ten. He'd got in a fight at school, which really is awfully common, but apparently in the principal's office later that day he'd said a few things that alerted them. They brought in the school counselor, who gave him a form to fill out, essentially judging his stability by a piece of paper."  
  
"So he failed." Barret said, not a question. Tact was even less an issue of Barret's than usual, as the feeling of general creepiness kept him irritable.   
  
"Horribly." Reeve said slowly. "To a degree where they thought he had simply lied. So they told him to take the test again, and he refused. They sent him home, and they put him on temporary suspension until he would retake their test."  
  
"And how long did that last?" Cloud asked, wincing at his own memories of school and rebelling.  
  
"Its still going, I guess," Reeve said, "he never did it. After a while, and about three dozen letters to the regulator of education and colleges at Shinra, he said he had found a loop hole. All I had to do was commit Tyler to mental institution- its not as bad as it sounds-" Reeve tacked that part in quickly, as Tifas eyes had gone wide in horror. "-it would be for all of an hour, and would never show up in any way on any of his personal forms. All he needed to do was pass their psychological exam, and they would instantly release him, and the school would need to take him back."  
  
"So what went wrong?" Tifa asked, still not over the shock of hearing that Reeve had committed his own son to a place like this.  
  
"Two things, I guess," Reeve said. "He insisted on committing himself, said something about it would help him save face when he went back to school- God only knows how, but of course I didn't even understand that place when I attended it. And then he passed the test, with flying colors. They said that while he tested rather high for aggression, everything else was on the level with perfect sanity, though they did say he had an odd combination of personality traits."  
  
"He passed?" Cloud asked in surprise. "So how did we get..." he waved his hands around them in a circle, "here?"  
  
"Well, passing that test only opened the gate for him to be allowed out of here," Reeve explained, "it didn't make him leave. It was the old adage about camels and drinking, I suppose. He chose to stay, and I wasn't allowed to make him come with me, not until he signed the papers that said he was leaving under his own powers. So here he remained, and here he is now."  
  
"That's horrible!" Tifa said, putting her hand to her mouth, "Couldn't you talk him into coming out??"  
  
"I tried." Reeve said, and then amended what he'd just said. "Actually, I'm still trying. I visit here every day after work, but half the time he wont even talk to me, and the rest of the time he's just... not interested in what I have to say. He always seems distracted by something, but I don't know what it is, and neither do the shrinks here."  
  
Tifa was about to make another horrified outburst, but she was interrupted by a prim, tall looking nurse in a bizarre first aid hat with little furry cat shaped ears sticking out of the top, probably to do something her stern look would not- put the younger patients at ease. Cid went to ask her about them, but was cut off, like Tifa had been in turn. "Hello," she said, in the rushed and final voice of a women who had to give a lot of orders in a relatively short amount of time. "My same is Celine Anne, but please just call me CA, everyone else does. I believe you son," she turned directly to Reeve, "has been assigned under my care as of yesterday. I assume you're here about the phone calls?"  
  
Reeve looked startled. "Phone calls?" he asked, "I'm sorry, no, I've been out of town for a bit... traveling. Why, is something wrong?"  
  
"No, no, nothing of the sort," CA reassured him, patting his arm in a sympathetic gesture that seemed oddly devoid of warmth. The women was a professional through and through. And through. "He's just being a little difficult lately. Refusing to come in from excersize time, insisting on being switched to a room with a window, its quite odd behavior considering he usually prefers to be left inside in the dark. He wont tell us anything about it, so I called you in hopes that you could maybe get it out of him. That's not why you're here?'  
  
"Well, no..." Reeve said, looking quite taken aback. "But I did come to talk to him, and Ill be sure to ask him what that was about. Can we go see him?"  
  
"We?" CA asked, looking disapprovingly at the other four travelers accompanying Reeve. "I'm sorry, but only immediate family are allowed to speak with our patients. I thought you'd know that by now."  
  
"Yes," Reeve said, looking like a kid caught stealing cookies, "but..." he stared hopelessly at the women in front of him, then looked back in a brow beaten gesture of defeat at the others. It was obvious he had been beaten by this women in such issues several times before, or at least by women like her. "OK." He shot a quick look back at the others. "...I wont be long," he sighed, not sounding very hopeful about the success of his mission.  
  
The walk that awaited for him down the long gray colored hallway was never a happy one, as it never had quite a happy beginning and had yet to have a fulfilling conclusion. Of course, that seemed to be almost every walk he'd taken in the last fifteen years or so, if you don't count that little debacle with the big falling rock- and lets be honest- he was walking that through VR glasses. Didn't exactly cut it in the long run, and who knows, maybe it fell was a little weak in the short run as well.  
  
This time, however, the walk had a few new turns in it. They had indeed moved his sons room via his 'request', as the nurse had so primly put it, telling Reeve all he wanted to know about how Tyler had managed to get away with that little piece of special treatment. The room they took him to, while basically the same as the old one, had a wider window to look into it from, and the blinds to that window were, surprisingly, left open at the moment. For a second, Reeve peered in where his son was lying on a regulation white cotton bed, and then turned away just as quickly.  
  
The boy on the bed was fairly short for a male of 16 sets of seasons, but was built fairly widely, and it had never ceased to amaze Reeve how Tyler had managed to stay in shape when most of his time was spent crammed into a 7 x 7 room like this one. Even more curious was the short, bleached state of his hair, as hair cuts were infrequent in this place and hair dye was strictly prohibited. How his son had gotten hold of it Reeve would probably never know, but it stuck him as incredibly odd that, having the resources to sneak something that size into a confinement cell and he chose *bleach*? Besides, it had an odd clashing effect with the red shorts the boy always insisted on wearing, unheeding of the current weather and temperature.  
  
But none of those factors of the boys appearance had caused Reeve to look away. Instead, it was what was wrapped around his only child's shoulders, a tight fitting white coat that bound Tyler's arms tightly to his chest, and it just seemed incredibly unnecessary as the boy was lying quiet and docile. Reeve had only seen that jacket put on his son once before, and the way the ever present flash and bang hidden just behind the boy's eyes had simply gone out when it was fastened... it had made Reeve sick, and he'd literally begged to have the restrainment removed. Angrily, Reeve turned to one of the orderlies.  
  
"Why the hell does he have that on?" he barked, wishing the man he was yelling at was about a foot and a half shorter and weighed a hundred pounds less so he could threaten him properly.  
  
"Disorderly conduct," the man said with a shrug of his beefy shoulders. He hadn't put it on the kid, and very few things annoyed him more when parents and friends took it personally when things were done for the good of the patient.  
  
"Well could you take it off?" the anger had faded quickly from Reeve's voice, which was now just the soft spoken but firm sound of a parent who wanted help for their child. He imagined, had Tyler managed to stay in school, that he would be using the same tone of voice to try to weasel his kids way out of detention when he was caught with a hibachi or something.  
  
The orderly shrugged, and plucked one of the incredibly pompous walkie talkies from his belt, calling God knows who on it, asking for permission to lift the restraints from Reeve's boy. He looked tense, and the answer only seemed to make him worse, so Reeve feared a negative answer as the orderly replaced the communication box where it had been. Instead, he got another shrug. "Whatever you say," said the man submissively, and unlocked the door to Tyler's room. For his part, Tyler didn't even blink to acknowledge that the man was there, or that the door had been opened, until the orderly had come up within three feet of him. Then he sat up with a yawn.  
  
"You know," he said idly, his voice oddly high pitched for someone his age. "You really need to add a padlock to these or something." And with that, he stretched his arms up over his head, one of the exact things the strait jacket was meant to prevent. The reason why it failed to do that was quite obvious, as somehow every binding on the jacket had come undone, and it slid up over the boys head easily. With a flourish, he tossed it to the orderly, who gave him a sour look.  
  
"Very funny," the man said, trying to not act impressed as he quickly scurried back out the door. "Ill be right here," he told Reeve, "in case something happens." And with that, Reeve entered, and the man shut the door behind him.  
  
"What's with the bird?" his son asked, his voice disturbingly void of emotion.  
  
Reeve realized with a start that the small mechanical blue jay that had earlier been content to nestle itself in his shirt pocket and stay still, humming the gentle hum of a machine, had somehow managed to emerge without him feeling it, and was hovering happily around his right ear.   
  
"New pet," he said with a shrug, prompting an offended sounding chirp from the bird.  
  
"Dad." Tyler said slowly. "Is this about the window?"  
  
Reeve paused at that one, and then nodded. "Well, sort of," he admitted.  
  
"Hm." Tyler hummed thoughtfully, changing subjects in the time of a heart beat. "I have something for you."  
  
"Oh really?" Reeve asked with general surprise, not a parent used to getting crafts, gifts, or really anything besides vague recognition from his child.  
  
"Mhm..." Tyler muttered absently, and quickly began to fish around under his mattress. He seemed to catch something, but after a moment of examining it with his hand, moved on. This process repeated several times, and Reeve began to wonder just how much contraband was stashed under there. Before he got to ask, Tyler's face lit up, and with a crumpling sound he pulled a tablet of badly wrinkled papers out into the open. "Here it is!"  
  
Reeve reached for the papers with a tentative hand, knowing it was very likely that his son would suddenly yank them back out of his reach, destroy them, and never speak of them again. It was just the sort of thing Tyler did when he got bored. Instead, the youth seemed very eager for Reeve to take them, and impatient with the slowness he was extending his arm ended up thrusting them into his father's palm. Quickly, Reeve scanned the header. "Release forms..." he said, and hastily flipped to the back page, and looked down to the bottom. There were many signatures there, must of them having been inked years ago, but there was one fresh one- Tyler Lucia, written in dark red ink. "You signed them!" Reeve said happily.  
  
"Yeah, well." Tyler paused, as if he didn't have a single idea at what should follow those two words. "Yes. I did." That seemed to do nicely. "I cant very well go on a trip with you if I'm locked in here, can I?"  
  
For a moment, Reeve thought his son was speaking of some sort of vacation, and was just about to explain that they had something very important to do first- before realizing that the important thing was exactly what Tyler had been talking about. He looked up from the papers in confusion. "How did you...?"  
  
"Little bird. Like yours. It told me." Tyler explained, and seeing the stunned look on his father's face, suddenly burst out laughing. "Kidding, kidding. Though it did go well with the whole window, ne? Actually, I just sort of figured it out one morning. Or one night. Either way, I woke up in the morning with the distinct knowledge that I had to get the hell out of here and go somewhere with you. Go figure, right?"  
  
"...right." Reeve was beginning to feel dizzy, which was an altogether too common side effect when he spoke to his son. While Tyler always spoke cryptically, and with some of the oddest syntax since the muppet in that science fiction movie Reeve's one friend had liked so much, he had never given any indication of premonition before.  
  
"So. We goin'?" Tyler spoke like it was the simplest thing in the world, and Reeve realized with a feeling rather like being slapped that it was. Hospital rules and the bizarre desires of his child had made it all seem so complicated, but when those layers of red tape were removed it was just a matter of walking out the door. Well, that, and about three hours of explanations, which would of course need to follow a half hour of introductions.  
  
"Wait," Reeve said, stopping him with a raised hand. "There are some people who are going to be going with us."  
  
"Mom?" asked Tyler suddenly, his voice raising just a bit.  
  
Reeve was taken aback. Tyler had never even mentioned the concept of having a mother to him before, and as far as Reeve knew, he had just as little idea of who she was as Cid out in the lobby. "Um, no..." he fumbled, "friends of mine. Fighters. They're going to help us."  
  
"Us." Tyler said, and then giggled must uncharacteristically. "As if its all centered on us. Hate to break it to you dad, but I get the feeling the wind is going to have more importance in this than we do. Oh well, chores are chores, a mans work is never done, now are we, in a nutshell, going to get the fuck out of here now or not?"  
  
Not even bothering to try to correct his sons language, Reeve nodded. "Uh, sure. Have any stuff you want to pack?" he asked on a whim, then instantly regretted it. Anything Tyler had brought into here with him he would have used up or outgrown long ago.   
  
"Huh." His son said, and Reeve had no idea if he was seriously thinking it over or just mocking the question in and of itself. "Strait jacket, regulation issued toothbrush, six years of my life... no, I'm good."  
  
"...ah." His father said slowly.  
  
**  
  
Paper work was never something Reeve minded horribly, but this was ridiculous even for him. He had been wrong about the 'just walk out' part, as he seemed to be wrong about most things involving this hospital, because leaving involved a whole legion of dead trees with ink smeared on them to achieve. And a sore wrist. So, instead of the three hundred and twelve seconds it would take to get from Tyler's room to the exit, it was actually over an hour and a half before he was even allowed to take a step outside his door. When he did, it was with a great sense of finality, and the sheer look on the boys face added a little hope to Reeve's wish that no member of his friends or family would ever again come to a place like this.  
  
They walked out together, into the lobby where they were being waited for, but didn't look at all as a father and son traveling group, or even as friends. Instead, they merely appeared as a pair of people who happened to be going in the same direction at the same speed, and had started from the same spot. Thusly, it was quite uncomfortable as the four traveler's watched them approach, ready to be introduced quite stiffly and formally to the strange son of their friend.  
  
"Hiya." He said quickly, waving a quick hand of greeting, eyes pausing a moment to dwell on Tifa.  
  
"Hi..." came their generally mumbled and delayed response, an unintentional rudeness, as they were all trying to get some kind of handle on the youth in front of them. It wasn't like they expected him to try to bite one of their faces off or anything, but he *was* here for a reason, after all. Besides, it was quite putting off to expect someone dark, serious, and quiet, and have them walk right up and vocalize the word 'hiya' as if you'd just shared a deep and intimate conversation the night before.  
  
"So." He said, either ignoring or simply not catching their temporary discomfort. "I hear you have a suit for me." 


	20. The Trek to Hell

The wind was gentle, but more than enough to carry the over abundant smell of the sea to the noses of the two men who stood upon the light green hills of Junon, mingled with sand, allowing a moment of silent reflection as they stared out onto the shimmering blue sea. The waves that lapped against the coast were so drastically different than the torrents of water that had been pouring into the under ground compound it was unbelievable, and even Zack had to admit that these held a certain ancient beauty. That didn't stop a shiver from going repetitively up and down his spine as he stared, but it did help to lessen the intensity somewhat.  
  
Emotion and physical, the Gonganan's loads were lightened. The Ultima Sword, made of ultra light crystal, now replaced the bulky steel Buster sword in his back holster, and he had to admit he was taking an immediate shine to the weapon.   
  
Slowly, Rufus glanced down at the small metal disc he held in his hand, feeling the unnatural weight of it. A night of testing still hadn't yielded a single clue about what it was, though secretly he had begun to wonder if it was nothing at all. Never a man of faith, Rufus found it much more comfortable to think how a sword- though incredibly rare, even he had to admit- could have simply been left behind by one of the men, and there had been no weapon for Rufus at all.  
  
The two men tore their gazes from the sea and lifted them up, staring straight into the ever darkening skies out to the west. They knew it was where they were going, but for several reasons- some much more obvious than others- they didn't leave the spot they were on. Fort Condor would still be there an hour later, more or less, but the sea... huge, powerful, and all consuming... the sea would be around forever. Taking a simultaneous deep breath, the two began to walk inwards towards the harbor, where a ship had been hired to take them between the continents.   
  
***  
  
Reeve didn't know what to make of his son... or of his bird, honestly. Both of his new companions were completely foreign to him, but while the one was made of steel and wires and he seemed to have some sort of a mental connection with, the other was made of flesh and blood- his flesh and blood, at that- and was blocking him out to a degree that he felt like there was a literal wall between the two of them. Tyler was kind enough when he tried to talk to him, but wasn't open about anything Reeve tried to pursue, even to the simplest degree. In fact, whenever it became apparent Reeve was particularly interested in a certain topic, Tyler changed the subject with such subtly Reeve never noticed until after the fact.  
  
Tyler himself lumbered ahead of Reeve, ahead of Barret, ahead of Cid and all the rest of them on their hike over the fields back towards the Highwind. Saved from fatigue by the aided movement from his new robotics suit, which he wore more or less like a normal suit- step into it, close it around you, and it performs its job of concealment and protection. He had gotten used to the controls almost startlingly fast, the joystick like controllers mounted a few inches up from either of his thighs glowing to life whenever his fingers were within a few inches of them.  
  
Cloud and Tifa walked hand in hand, fingers locked, the smallest of a laundry list of small rebellions against the oppressions that always seemed to be plaguing them. Barret, seeming to disapprove of such a rebellion with every fiber of his body, managed to storm past them several times on the way, though neither could truly remember ever managing to pass him the second way around. He was taking advantage of his new prosthetic by idly drumming the fingers on the flat metal sheet of the palm.  
  
Only Cid seemed truly at ease, walking casually off to the side, Neptune's Highlight lying stretched out across his broad and burden bearing shoulders. He wrapped his long lengthy arms backwards around the shaft of the lance, and used it to stretch his joints as he walked. Had anyone bothered to look, they would have noticed something very odd about him- something they weren't able to place. After a few moments of searching, they would have noticed that he wasn't smoking- not that he'd have been free to, with both arms occupied. It wasn't entirely a rare occurrence, but it certainly wasn't seen often... and for the first time ever in such an occurrence, he wasn't twitching.  
  
The group moved in a loose formation, sometimes alternating within themselves and sometimes changing the order, but there was always some sort of rules about it. It was the march of a platoon, the march of an army... the march of soldiers.  
  
***  
  
Its still cold, Rory thought- but then again, it seemed everywhere they went that didn't happen to directly be Aeris' house ended up cold. Still... she had to admit she felt a little bit warmer with Gabriel's chilling blue blade back in its sheath, and his fiery blade on her side of his waist. Neither of them could really decide if it actually gave off heat or not, but it sure as hell seemed like it did. She hated the cold. It reminded her way too much of empty cars her and her brother had been forced to sleep in during the middle of the night, with all the windows busted out by bricks and stones, and stray gunfire. Down south, she heard, it would at least be warmer... though she doubted she could enjoy it with somebody trying to kill her. Several somebodys.  
  
Gabriel, on the other hand, wouldn't have minded going back to the cave, rebuilding the fire, and going to sleep- preferably to stay there. The last few days had simply been cluster fucked with things he wasn't used to and didn't understand, and he had broken the five month transformation streak he had developed by switching all of twice in so many days. It was just... irritating, is all. Gabriel didn't like action, and he didn't like heat. It would be hot down south. At least, he thought, there would be someone trying to kill him.  
  
***  
  
"So what's it like to be leaving home right after getting there?"  
  
Reno snorted, walking alone by himself off to the side of the path. Though the others pretended not to notice it, Yuffie was off to the other side, directly opposite of him. He wasn't snorting at her though, instead he was snorting at the question. Typical Elena question, something pointless, and insane, that would serve only to spill valuable information to anyone who would be listening- in form, and in answer. Stupid.  
  
"As far as I'm concerned, I've only been away from home for a few weeks." That was Tseng, openly sharing his opinion of the year that passed while he was slightly deceased. "So it doesn't really matter." He'd stopped by Wutai soon before going to visit the Temple of the Ancients, but it wasn't like it would have mattered to him even if he hadn't. He wasn't a home oriented man, he wasn't a tree, and the very last thing he wanted to do was put down some roots. He was a wanderer, always had been, and always would be. The fact that he was wandering somewhere insanely dangerous did little to daunt the feeling of calm that was over him as he walked openly under the stars.  
  
"So?" There came Yuffie, calling from her distanced stance away from the rest of them. "Any minute off this continent should leave you wanting to come back, or you aren't a true Wutain." A patriot to a fault, Yuffie truly believed that the waters that ran through the Wutain streams were the same liquid that ran through her veins. It wasn't like Tseng had verbally assaulted her birthplace, but anything short of a roaring compliment wasn't enough in her mind. This was the place she would always return to, and the thought of dying, or being buried somewhere else was absolutely unbearable, and kicked her patriotism into over drive.  
  
"I don't think you've ever been to Icicle Inn," Elena chided her quietly, resolute but knowing when to keep her tongue in cheek. Despite the time Cloud had ducked her sucker punch and she had gone summersaulting down the slope like a snowball, she simply couldn't get enough of the towering white peaks. Maybe she was cold blooded, she didn't know, but she could walk around in her business clothes and a skirt in ankle deep snow without even feeling a chill. And now she was heading south, where it was warm... and dangerous.  
  
Rude, who had been humming an old Mideel tune that he remembered from some mission a long time ago, began to hum it very much louder, just in case Yuffie had indeed heard what Elena had whispered, in vain hopes that she would keep quiet. He was... content. Of course, he was almost always content. Walking, fighting, working out... as long as he was doing something, he was perfectly happy with his situation and himself, and that's why he barely talked- there was no need to. Lock him in an empty room, he reckoned, and he'd chatter like a lunatic within the hour. He was the only one who wasn't worried about the thing they were about to do.  
  
After all, he thought, its better than doing nothing at all. 


	21. The Gates of Hell

Renovations had been done fast on the landscape of what used to be Fort Condor- one of the benefits of having something that was virtually the widest slave labor operations of all time was that when you wanted something done, and you wanted something done fast, that's exactly the speed that it got done. The towering stone building, which had been so painstakingly carved into the image of the bird from which it got its name sake, had been utterly destroyed, the rubble and debris that had been left from Hojo's rampage drug into lines and piled up to make a towering wall of junk. The walls stretched for about a quarter mile, ending at the mountain itself, and after that- well, after that, only the builders knew the truth of it.  
  
Stretching between the opposite end of the walls was quite possibly the most terrifying entrance way that had ever been conceived of on this earth. Ignore the fact that it was huge, mammoth, that the mere sight of it could make you feel as small and insignificant as getting a glimpse at the true scope and depth of the universe. Ignore the fact that it made no sense, an incoherent- and yet brilliant- twisting and jarring of shapes and symbols that somehow fit together with seamless perfection to bar an entrance way. That stuff didn't really matter much, Rory reasoned...  
  
...at least not next to the bones.  
  
Bones, humans have incredible amounts of them, and despite the classic image of femur bone lying on the ground as the key clue to solving a mystery, most of them are quite small and delicate. Those were the ones used to bind the other bones together. The entire gate, in all its gore and splendor, was made of bleached white bones, bound together by their own ilk, blocking the way of the two travelers.  
  
"I think I'm going to be sick..." Rory said breathlessly, clutching at her stomach. The color of her skin and the look in her eyes led Gabriel to believe very sincerely that she was telling the truth.  
  
"Hey," he fumbled, looking frantically through his mind for a reason that she shouldn't throw up besides for the fact that if she did, he was positive he would follow suit. "Most of those are just animal bones."  
  
Rory took the time he spent stammering to crouch down on the ground and lower her head down between her knees, taking deep uncertain breaths in an effort to calm herself. It seemed to work, as the next time she spoke it was with at least a degree or two of more certainty. "No," she said with a groan, "they aren't. But thank you."  
  
Gently, Gabriel helped her two her feet, and the two resumed staring at the gruesome blockade that barred their path much as they had for the last five minutes or so. They couldn't see anything that was even conceivably a door, or a handle, or even an intercom system so they could ask nicely to be left inside, and they both agreed vehemently that if it became a choice between the world ending and them having to climb the gate, that they would go get drunk off their asses for the next week or two until the Apocalypse finally came.  
  
"Well..." Gabriel said slowly, his eyes narrowed by the glare of the sun. "We could try to break it."  
  
"Or," a voice answered from behind him, low and rasping, "you couldn't."  
  
To say that Rory and Gabriel jerked in surprise would be an understatement, but when they finally returned to the surface of the earth's crust they hastily spun around, seeing something that there was no way they should not have heard- at least five minutes ago. A dozen men stood behind them, decked out in what looked to be some street persons Halloween costume, make shift suits of armor formed out of things that no man had ever worn for protection before- trash cans, hub caps, car doors, and to Gabriel's horror, a coffee can. Along with the humorous attire of the men behind them, however, there was a very non humorous shank of steel extending from each of the mans grips, swords that appeared to be lazer sharp as they glistened in the light. It wasn't hard to spot the bright red letter H that had been forcibly carved into the palms of each man.  
  
"Uh, actually, we're lost..." Gabriel started talking quickly, but he realized how utterly pointless it was. Why would a lost tourist try to break a gate? Unless, of course, there was a mental institution somewhere around here they could have came from... but the only place like that he knew of was in Kalm.  
  
"Bullshit," the man said simply, "now get your hands up over your head and keep them there."  
  
Rory glared at him, not raising her hands. "Very official sounding," she growled, "were you a cop before you came here to work for an absolute lunatic?"  
  
The man fixed her with an angry gaze, his eyes clear and angry. "Rory Tremaine," he spat at the ground, "smart mouth little bitch who knows more than is good for her, and that's still only half of what she thinks she knows. Yeah, the big man told us about you. You are both going inside."  
  
Seeming stunned, Rory reluctantly raised her hands, and at the same time she shoved the handle of the switchblade Reno had gifted her into her sleeve. The man who had spoken gestured to one of the members of his group, who gave him a surprised and angry look, but walked resolutely forward to the gate, seemingly tracing the intricate pattern with his eyes. He watched the twists and turns looping around in an indecipherable curve, until he finally came across an organization of bones that seemed to form an H. Clenching his eyes tightly, he pushed his palm against the markings, lining up his cuts.  
  
It happened before Rory or Gabriel even knew it had begun. The thin bones, sharpened by natural form or by the hand of man they had no idea, popped out from the wall with a small click, dipping into the man's hand wound and opening the slices anew. He let out a low growl of pain, but apparently knew how to hold his tongue when the occasion called for it, as he simply backed up holding his injured appendage as the gates, now sparkling with fresh blood, suddenly split right down the middle.  
  
It was amazing, the answer to the puzzle, and it was as infuriatingly simple as every answer to every puzzle when you saw it. All of Hojos little tricks, turns, angles, and shapes led away from the fact that the gate was just that- a door split down the middle. How Gabriel and Rory had missed the straight crack neither of them knew, but at the moment, they didn't really care either. For the second time since they'd met, they were being taken into captivity.  
  
"Move ahead," the speaker said, speaker being how Rory now not-so-kindly referred to him in her mind. He was the only one who had deigned it necessary to speak a single word. "You will remain five feet ahead of us at all times. If you turn around more than 90 degrees in either direction we will cut you into more pieces than even God may put back together, do you understand me?"  
  
They nodded. Apparently not caring either way, the man was already prompting them forward at sword point. Not lowering their hands, the two travelers slowly turned and began to take short, nervous strides into the yawning mouth of the tunnel. Though the man did not speak again, and the men he was with did not speak at all, they could sense the silent armed crew walking behind them at all times as they made their way, flanked by towering heaps of garbage on each side. The silence, as they say, was defeaning.  
  
And then they rounded a corner, and the silence, as I say, was shattered.  
  
"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god..." Rory reeled on her feet, feel down to her knees, and went to spin around to retch into the dirt. Remembering the words of their captors to the letter, Gabriel caught her head in mid spin, and simply helped lower her to the ground where she emptied the contents of her stomach in much abundance. With horrified, disbelieving eyes, Gabriel gazed up from his fallen friend to the scene that had caused her to become so.  
  
The walled tunnel gave way into a much broader room, a room filled with wandering bands of men, lit up with fires and machines. Everyone inside seemed to be at work, seemed to have been assigned some job or another, and all were busy. It seemed to have been carved from the mountain itself, but that wasn't what caught the eye in any way, shape, or form. Instead, it was the final entrance way, the final threshold you would need to cross before entering that room that grabbed your attention. Lined up in double rows, on crosses made from shattered telephone poles, fourteen men hung crucified.  
  
It was amazing what happens when you simply see the most gruesome thing you will ever see in your entire life- there is a small, ever so small, nanofractional spark of relief in the pit of your stomach that whispers to you in an ever smaller voice. This is it, it tells you, this is the worse that it gets- and you survived it. Its horrible, and its wrong, but you're still here. That voice, unfortunately, is never heard in its gentle whisper- there is a thousand times louder screaming panic, terror, and disgust piled on top of it.  
  
The men- and they were all men- were different, every one. There seemed to have been no pattern in their killing, no point in the slayings as a whole. They were naked, utterly, and some of them in various beginning states of decomposition. The stakes that had been used to peg them into the wood stuck out plainly, coated with dark lumps of dried blood, pinning both ankles and one hand. One hand only, because the second hand- the one, Gabriel noticed, fighting off dry heaves, that had before worn the H symbol- had been loped clean off of the arm.  
  
"Oh god..." Rory repeated to herself, wiping her lips with the back of her hand, "why would they ever... why would they.... why?"  
  
"Discipline," Gabriel whispered to her in a strained voice. "They took their hands with the Hojo marking. Traitors, maybe..."  
  
"Traitors indeed!" a voice came, high and twisted sounding, mangled, but recognizable instantly as a women's voice. Strutting up to them, emerging from the shadows with amazing stealth, was a tall, pale figure, with long flowing silver hair. The clothes she wore was bizarre, bulky and spiky black armor that gave the appearance of some sort of a humanoid crab, covering almost everything but her face and her arms... and her arms were covered by something entirely else. Her skin was stained with what could only have been blood, seeped deep in color, resembling a pair of crimson gloves.  
  
"Traitors indeed." She repeated, and while very little could sway the opinion that she was crazy from their minds, her voice was not near as hysterical as they figured it would be. She had an air about her that suggested both sanity and insanity, though her attire and appearance obviously tilted the viewer very hard towards the latter of those two possibilities. "Traitors to the over all power of the cause. Traitors because they wanted to lead it, and in doing so, weaken it. But they fell, as all traitors shall."  
  
"O-OK..." Rory said slowly, staring at the lady in wide eyes. "That's, um, good."  
  
"Indeed..." the lady said, narrowing her eyes, and for an instant they seemed to glow the yellow of a cat at night. "And today, two more are added to the list."  
  
Gabriel did a quick double take. "Is there," he asked, "the slightest chance you are not referring to us?"  
  
The women regarded him with cruel amusement. "No," she said, "I don't believe so."  
  
"Ah..." Gabriel said, practically whimpering, his hands dangling inches from his waist where his two daggers hung limply. "Right. May I ask you a question?"  
  
The women didn't answer. Not being denied, Gabriel decided to go for it.   
  
"Would you kill yourself," he said, stumbling at first, then rushing out the last words as quickly as he could, so they came out in a jumbled rush, "if you weakened the cause?"  
  
"Though you speak of things of which you know nothing about and towards people you have never met," the lady hissed, "the answer to the last question you shall ever ask is yes. Now..." To the horror of both Rory and Gabriel, the lady reached behind her back and seized the handle of a massive blade that was sheathed across her spine, and drew it out straight away. What metal the thick sword was made of neither of them could tell, and the only hint they had was that it was stained an impossible red.  
  
"Oh come on!" Rory said, thanking Christ her voice didn't squeak. "I think you're being a little hasty here! I mean... I mean... were just passing by and your guys grabbed us! Were-"  
  
"-messengers from the white bitch, as I have been told. You've come here to try to over throw the black order, babes and lambs against the armed lions of war." The lady spoke mechanically, walking towards them as she recited her words like a recording that had been sketched into her hand.  
  
"Black order?" Gabriel asked, he and Rory backing up to match the women's advances step by step. "From what I was told, lady, the guy you're working for doesn't really believe in that sort of pretentious bullshit. He's a scientist."  
  
Well there goes my platform of non involvement, Rory thought to herself with a mental sigh. "And even if he did, you've weakened the order yourself!"  
  
That gave the women pause. "Explain," she said simply, the implications of the word deadly.  
  
"You let us keep our weapons!" Rory said, a sudden outburst of inspiration. "If you know so much about us, you should know we have them! We could kill at least one of these men right now, and you wouldn't have stopped it! You'd be weaker!" She was wincing at the vagueness and hopelessness of her own argument.   
  
The advance of the women started again in all its robotics glory, her doubts reassured and erased. "We were not told of any such weapons," she said bizarrely, her eyes clearly on the hilt of Gabriel's revealed daggers. "If they were of any consequence at all, we would have been." Despite being several yards away from them, the women raised the weapon high above her head.  
  
"Maybe..." Gabriel said, before realizing he had no idea of what maybe would lead to. He decided to make something up on the fly. "Maybe he didn't know we had them! Maybe he isn't as good as you think, did you ever wonder about that! Maybe he doesn't see everything!" He was shouting by the end, and he realized he was slipping into a sort of hysteria. He prided his composure in any situation under god, but it was more than a little difficult to focus while corpses dangled a few feet to your left.  
  
The women remained adamant. "Lord Hojo sees all," she said, with ultimate finality.  
  
Gabriel's eye flickered involuntarily behind him, the by product of nearly tripping over a stone. He found himself looking into the entrance from which he had come, and then quickly looked back to the women. Almost casually, he stepped to the side.  
  
A gunshot cracked out, cutting through the rest of the noise. A small, simple looking red dot appeared directly beneath the women's left breast, and she stared at it idly... and then wordlessly collapsed. Rory spun around in shock, to see a rag tag group of four people, three men and a women, in blue suits standing with a Wutain ninja. Reno had his pistol out, pointed, and a whisp of smoke emitted from the tip.  
  
"I bet," Gabriel ventured, "he didn't see that coming."  
  
With that final sarcastic quip, all hell broke loose.  
  
Whatever it had been that had kept the men, who looked like they suffered from more blood lust than anyone Gabriel had ever met- and being in the Turks training that really said something- at bay, whatever indechiperable force had kept them silent and stable, seemed to snap as the long haired women fell. In one, fell second, every eye in the room suddenly went from vague and unfocused to lazer sharp... and fell upon them.  
  
Ice and fire blazed to life as Gabriel ripped his daggers free of their sheaths and twirled them in his hands, only barely aware of how he no longer felt the effects of their temperature differences against his skin. A trifecta of men charged up to him, weapons drawn and raised, and Gabriel readied himself. He ducked the first overhead swing, hearing the wind scream above his head, and came up crossing his arms, stabbing to the left with his right arm and to the right with his left. Each blow buried itself below an armored chest plate, and two men fell, one man with a cut frozen shut and the other with one cauterized.  
  
Gunfire blazed behind him, the Turks obviously set to work of their own with the man who had escorted them into this pit in the first place. This left the third man who had rushed Gabriel free to swing his weapon, a blow that the boy barely escaped with his life by simply slamming himself as hard and as flat as he could against the ground, a move he knew was a fatal mistake. It was a dodge you only used if by missing the swing the other man would be incapacitated- because pinned, immobile, his next hit would surely kill you. Steel raised high in the air, and Gabriel raised his head to see the smirking face of death- suddenly freeze.  
  
Rory had made sure she got the blade releasing twist just right that night Reno had given her the switch blade. Thrust, twist, and squeeze... it was simple, but for some reason she wanted to perfect it, wanted to be able to flash that steel out in a split second the very first time she needed to. And then the first time shed needed to had come and gone... and it had gotten stuck. She let out a panicked growl and tried again, coming up behind the man trying to take a foot off of Gabriel's height and several decades off his life, and thrust, twisted, and squeezed with a hard underhand swing.  
  
The dark green blade popped free, lacing through the mans leg with suck a small knick Rory doubted he'd even felt it. A solitary, dark drop of blood welled up in the cut... and then promptly turned black. Rory watched in horror as veins as green as the blade of her weapon suddenly sprouted under the skin of the mans leg, bulging and pulsing, and quickly raced up his thigh. They disappeared under his pants, but a moment before he collapses, Rory saw them sprout to the tips of his fingers and go up through his neck, lacing towards his temple. He hit the ground and laid still.  
  
Gabriel stared at her from his spot on the ground, eyes shocked but grateful. "Well," he said, breathing hard, "it's a good thing you didn't test that on your finger." His eyes flickered behind her. "Think you can do it to all of them?"  
  
Spinning, Rory turned to see what he was looking at. All the men in the back room who had been so busy before now had entirely new pre-occupations... advancing on them with an entire cache of random weapons, pipes, tools, blades... she counted at least thirty in all, and behind them, there was a whole row of men with much more deadly weapons- guns.   
  
The immediate solution was obvious enough, and Rory and Gabriel followed it to the letter by running like hell, skidding behind a set of rocks while bullets whizzed around their ears, coming from both directions as the Turks returned fire, and then in turned joined the two behind the relative protection of the mountains owns insides.  
  
"You owe me a drink," Rory panted to Reno, rubbing a cut that was now ripped into her leg from a bad skid on a sharp rock. "We beat you here."  
  
"Yeah," Reno conceded, "and if we ever get the fuck out Ill get you a whole pack of Coronas. Don't count on it though, kid." His voice was grim, but his eyes had a strange look, a frenzied savagery, an apparent psychotic rage barely masked by his usual shields of sarcasm bullshit. He was not letting his sister go down again, not while he still had legs beneath him. Almost casually he twisted a knob on the top of his nightstick, and aimed it absently around the edge of the stone, and pulled the trigger.  
  
There was a bizarre sparkling sound, and then a sudden flash, not the usual lightning strike but instead simply what it was- a sudden burst of light that seemed to glow white hot, instance enough that it seared the very retinas of their attackers eyes, and almost like being hit by a shock wave the first line of attack fell backwards, clutching eyes that momentarily saw nothing but sparkling white dots. Taking the general cue, the Turks raised up above their protection and opened fire. Bullets blazed back and forth, and when Elena emptied her clip, she reached inside her jacket for something a little more substantial- the small Derringer she had picked up in Wutai.   
  
She fired once into the crowd, and men blew backwards like pebbles in a rain storm. She fired twice, and again they fell, but as she went to squeeze the trigger a third time in the series of rapid bursts a stray metal slug caught her shoulder, ripping it clean open and sending her flying backwards. Tseng, executing agility even he didn't believe he had, holstered his pistol and spun, catching Elena an inch above the ground, where her brains were about to be scattered on a particularly large stone. Her eyes were wide in surprise, as if she wasn't sure why she fell, but the answer was easy enough- her shoulder had almost been ripped in half.  
  
Rude and Reno dropped down below the rocks to join Rory, Gabriel and Yuffie, who were crouched hard against the stone to avoid a similar fate to Elena. They crawled across the ground to their fallen companion, skittering across the stones like a pair of spiders, and slid next to Tseng. She was going pale, slipping into shock, and one glance at her limb told them why- she'd never raise her right arm again, that much was sure. Reno ripped his jacket from his shoulders and began to tore it into strips, a makeshift bandage to stem the blood gushing from the wound. "How ya doing rook?" he whispered to her as he worked.  
  
All the cold expertise Elena had built up around herself over the past year seemed to have disappeared, and she had become the wide eyed frightened face that Reno had stared into so long ago, right before pulling the plug on his own sister. "It hurts," Elena said quietly, her eyes seeming to unfocus as she spoke, and an unstoppable growl of rage ripped itself from Reno's throat. Why the fuck couldn't he ever protect the people who were important to him!? Tseng, Rory, Elena, everyone was getting hurt, and none of them deserved it! Why did he keep walking around unscathed when he was the only one who deserved to die!?  
  
His agonized thoughts were punctuated by a sudden, fresh sound, a new source of blazing gun fire, and he instinctively moved around to cover Elena more thoroughly from any stray shells. When none came, he looked wildly over his shoulder, glancing around the stones they were using for protection, at one of the most bizarre things he had ever seen. A robot seemed to be marching through the crowd of men, gunfire blazing from the rips of its arms, ammunition bouncing uselessly off of its metal hide. Flanking it on any side- every side- was Strife, Tifa, Barrett, Avalanche as a whole, cutting through the men who had pinned them down. Currently uninterested in the scene behind him, Reno turned his gaze back to Elena, and began wrapping the bandage.  
  
For the moment, keeping her alive was all the mattered.  
  
***  
  
Tyler Lucia was in several different forms of heaven. He figured that happiness was like a flower, the central core that was you, and then thousands of petals the branched out in any direction. Some petals bigger than others, more important, the ones that were rarely in bloom. Noise, power, destruction, and most of all invulnerability were some of Tyler's largest petals, and as we speak they were in full bloom, soaking up the sun. The machine worked flawlessly around him as he surged forward, gunning men down like wheat, in the middle of the best video game *ever*...  
  
He heard his father yelling something, dully, far back behind the sound of the hail of bullets he was letting out, the strongest game hero of all time, the Mario, the Duke Nukem, the Sonic....  
  
"Tyler! Tyler! Slow down!"  
  
He finally made sense of the words, and realized that like usual his father was trying to hold him back. Of course he had progressed faster than the others, they were slow and weak where he was fast and strong, the bosses minions took more time to pass for them than they did for him. They should have upgraded their weapons... Tyler looked back at the battle scene, admiring the graphics of the situation. Very well done.   
  
When he turned back, all he saw was the black hole of a pistol pointed directly between his eyes, through the spot he had stepped into his armor from. His eyes went wide, his pupils dilated, and he suddenly snapped out of his stupor, his suspension of disbelief returned- this wasn't one of his hallucinations, he was actually here, and he wasn't going to get any continues if he died here- if being a useless word, because he had a second left to go, and he gritted his teeth in anticipation of the strike.  
  
It never landed. A man he had never seen before, a man in blue, leaped clean over the back of his armor, coming down with a crystal sword strike right across the chest of the man about to gun him down. The gun fired, a single slug smacking home an inch to the left of Tyler's temple, shredding through circuitry and metal. It was like a plug had been pulled, and with a sudden deflation his armor deactivated, and crumpled to the ground.  
  
Reeve slid into position beside the man who had saved his sons life, shot him an uncomprehending look, and quickly began undoing the snaps that held the armor into place around his sons body. When they were all gone he raised the chest plate up above Tyler's head and pulled him out of the suit, laying him across his legs as he lay as limp as a wet noodle. He shook the boy, whispering his name over and over, but no response came. He checked the pulse, and found it, faint but there, throbbing with the rhythm of life.   
  
"Get his legs out," the man clad in blue said, gesturing towards the boys lower extremities which were twisted along the ground. Reeve lifted him up and straightened them, and then looked at the man in confusion.  
  
"Who are you?" he asked, still tapping his son on the cheek, searching for some sign of revival. The man, who was eyeing Tyler with professional concern, opened his mouth to answer.  
  
"Zack!"  
  
The voice cut through whatever they were about to say, the voice of Cloud, who came charging over with a stunned look on his face. He and Zack stared at each other for a moment, recognition in their eyes, but suddenly Clouds gaze flecked to Tyler, and he crouched by the boy. "What happened?" he asked Reeve.  
  
"I'm... I'm not sure," the man answered him, running his hands back through his hair. "He was about to get shot, and, uh, Zack is it? Saved him... and then he just fell... but I cant see a bullet hole... what?"  
  
"What are you doing here?" Cloud asked Zack, who was looking absolutely stricken at this point.  
  
"Aeris... uh..." Zack fumbled, not something he was used to doing, "Sent us, we're here to help."  
  
"We?" Cloud asked sharply, looking around.  
  
"Me too..." a voice said, low and deep, directly behind them. Reeve and Cloud turned to see Rufus, absently prodding one of Hojo's fallen soldiers with his toe. "Though we got here a little late, it seems. I only got one... the kid was quite a wrecking machine in that gatling gun with legs."  
  
"You!" Reeve half screamed, popping up to his feet with eyes wide. "What do you have to do with this!?"  
  
"The same thing as him," Rufus said simply, gesturing at Zack, who looked a little put off at the association. "I'm here to terminate an old employee. Literally."  
  
"Bullshit," Cloud snarled at him, lifting his long silver sword in warning as he rose to his feet. "You've never tried to help someone if it endangers yourself."  
  
"Correct," Rufus agreed, slinging his shotgun backwards over his shoulder. "But as far as I've been told, if someone doesn't slip Hojo a very permanent pink slip, were all more than a little fucked. Id rather not die by something I'm not even involved in, Strife."  
  
Cloud opened his mouth to make an angry retort, but was cut off by a sudden wave of barking laughter, absolutely rife with maniacal glee. The four men, Zack, Cloud, Rufus and Reeve, all looked suddenly in the direction of it, but nothing was seen besides more blackness deeper into the mountain.   
  
"Hojo," Cloud hissed, under his breath for some inexplicable reason, "we have to go get him."  
  
"Agreed," Rufus said slowly, then his eyes fell upon Tyler. "Who's staying with the kid?"  
  
"Me," Reeve said, "I'm his father."  
  
"Really?" Rufus asked, taken aback. "I didn't even know you had sex."  
  
"I..." Reeve paused, "what?"  
  
"Nothing..." Rufus said. "Has that done anything yet?" He extended a finger, pointing at the small mechanical bird that was humming just an inch above Reeves ear. Reeve realized he had gotten so used to its presence he barely even noticed it anymore, it didn't seem to do anything besides hover and beep.   
  
"No... why?" Reeve asked.  
  
"Then you're going." Rufus said, "Ill stay with the boy."  
  
"What? Why?" Reeve demanded.  
  
"We were given these little tools for a reason, Lucia. We need them to win. If you stay here, your little... thing... there wont have done what it needs to, and were fucked."  
  
Reeve blinked at him. "Are you serious?"  
  
"Yes," Rufus said, "and thorough. Ill just watch over him to make sure he doesn't suddenly go into seizures, its not like Id be much help in the fight anyway."  
  
"If this is a trick..." Cloud threw himself back into the conversation, stunned at Rufus' revelation of his own weakness.  
  
"Ah yes, I forgot," Rufus growled, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "because I tried to cut prices by using a natural resource, that naturally makes me the sort of guy who would cut a childs throat as he lay unconscious for no personal gain whatsoever."  
  
"....right," Cloud said, taken aback. His eyes flickered to Reeve. "Are you OK with this?"  
  
The public reactions man took a deep, shuddering breath, and shot his immobile son a final worried look before nodding his head. "I guess," he reasoned, "I have to be."  
  
"Tseng! We need to get going!" Cloud had already turned and was shouting towards the leader of the Turks, who was gathered in tense silence with the rest of the adventurers. The pale man shot him Cloud an angry look, but restraining his temper, stepped back out of the ring he and the others had formed around Elena, revealing her to Cloud, who's draw dropped accordingly.  
  
"Oh god..." he muttered, and looked back to Rufus. "Looks like you're on double duty."  
  
The former president snorted once, indignantly. "Thanks for your trust, Soldier."  
  
"..." Cloud paused, and decided to let it slide. They truly didn't have time for this. He jogged up to Tseng, who was once again stooped over the fallen Turk, and laid a cautious hand on his shoulder. Not even twitching at the sudden contact, Tseng glanced back over his shoulder to better hear what Cloud had to say. "We need to go," the leader of Avalanche said quietly, "he'll keep an eye on Elena until we get back."  
  
A raised eyebrow was all the questions Tseng needed to ask, and Cloud stepped to the right and pointed over at Rufus, who was kneeling next to Reeve and Zack in further attempts to revitalize the inexplicably unconscious Tyler. Tseng wasn't the only one to follow the direction of vision, and a variety chorus of gasps and muttering rang out, suddenly cut off as Reno snapped out under his breath, "I'm not even going to fucking ask at this point..." he growled, realizing once again how little a grip he had on this situation, his eyes boring into Rufus.  
  
It seemed like a split second before Tseng was on his feet, had removed Cloud's palm from his shoulder with a casual sweep of his arm, and was storming directly towards Rufus. The former president saw him coming and rose to meet him, but whatever he opened his mouth to say was cut off as Tseng grabbed him by the front of the shirt collar and yanked him forward, so the two men were eye to eye. "You try anything," he hissed, "anything at all, and I will kill you. Slowly."  
  
Roughly, Rufus pried the Turks fingers off of his shirt and took a step back, pulling straight his ruffled shirt. "You got it," he said distastefully. "What do you people think of me, anyway? I'm a business man, not a psychopath."  
  
"Right." That settled, Tseng turned on his heel, and drew from under his jacket the long staff he had found in the so called sacred lands of Wutai. "Rude, Reno," he called over his shoulder, "let's go. Rory, Gabriel, you too."  
  
It wasn't lost on Cloud that Tseng apparently had every plan to advance with or without the rest of them, even though it had been their idea to go on first. In any other situation he would have called it, but this was the last place he wanted to get into a power struggle. He quickly gathered together the present members of Avalanche and Zack, and went to follow the Turks- the three unwounded members, at least. They trudged on into the darkness, leaving Elena, Tyler, and Rufus behind, the president the only one watching them go, with a deadpan look on his face.  
  
Reno jogged up from his sister a bit, coming into matching strikes with Tseng. "What if I told you," he said, "I need about five minutes back here to do something that I cant, and never will, tell you a single word about." While Tseng shot him a startled look, Reno continued. "And you can pass the time by handing the packages I bought in Wutai off to the kids.  
  
Looking thoroughly confused, Tseng scanned his partners eyes for a moment, dark hazel scanning over even darker green, and then he issued a short nod. "Don't take too long," he said, "we have a job to finish."  
  
"Yeah, yeah..." with permission granted, Reno's attention switched. "Rory!" he called, and when his sister had sped up enough to catch up with him, he gave her an appraising look. "You and the others are going to walk for a bit, and then I need you to wait for me, OK?"  
  
"What?" Rory asked, alarmed, "why?"  
  
"Cant say," Reno said with a shrug, "but Ill be real quick. OK?"  
  
"Uh...sure..." Rory said, blinking in surprise at her brothers odd behavior. With his second and last needed confirmation attained, Reno halted his walking and allowed the others to slowly peel away from him, drawing odd looks from the other members of the traveling party who hadn't heard his request. He dismissed them by turning his back, and hastily jogged off into the darkness.   
  
He wasn't going far, just around a single row of rocks that was a little higher than his head, and instantly saw what he was looking for. Lying on the ground, propped up against one of the stones and hastily peeling away the armor that covered her chest, was Neo. She didn't seem surprised to see Reno, and barely lifted her eyes from the bleeding wound that adorned her skin like a badge, revealed by the lack of a breast plate shed just pulled off.  
  
"I knew you were coming here," she said, panting, her voice ragged from exertion. "As soon as you showed up in Wutai. Its why I took your god damn electro rod apart and burnt the pieces."  
  
Reno subconsciously gripped the nightstick that was hidden under his dark blue jacket, but decided there was no need to mention it. The knowledge of her failure wouldn't hurt or aide her in a few seconds anyway. "Yeah, well, you forgot to take my gun." He growled. "Speaking of which, when did you start carrying one?"  
  
As if on cue, the scarce light in the mountain caught over the handle of a small black pistol that lay unhandeled by the silver haired women's legs. "Since today," Neo said with a small smile, and for the first time Reno saw the single streak of blood that licked out from between her lips and ran down her jawbone. "Did I get the bitch?"  
  
"...you hit her," Reno said coldly, remembering watching Neo pull the trigger from her spot on the stone floor of the mountain, and then a second later seeing Elena fall back spraying blood.   
  
"Good..." Neo said, her voice obviously failing, and she leaned her head back against the stone. "Good."  
  
"How long we know each other?" Reno asked suddenly, pulling a cigarette from his pocket, no pack included, and promptly lighting it up.  
  
"I don't know..." Neo said, her voice resorting to a whisper. "Since I let you fuck me after a night at a bar, I guess."  
  
"Right, right..." Reno said, taking a single drag from the cancer stick and then tossing it away, allowing it to smolder itself out on the stones. "That was fun. You've been a good chick, too, keeping me with bullets, discounts on weapons and shit... hell, you even found me my house."  
  
Neo said nothing, suddenly over come by a fit of coughing. Reno took a few quiet steps closer to her.  
  
"I like you," he whispered, "and you are one crazy bitch. But you tried to kill one of my sisters..." he paused, in a sudden moment of self reflection. "And you shot the other one. I've developed a very strict policy against that."  
  
Two things happened at once. First of all, Neo dropped the feint of lost strength, and surged forward suddenly, ignoring the searing pain from her gun shot wound as she went to bring her sword around in an eviscerating arc. Second, Reno kicked forward, catching her under the jaw and throwing her head straight back, pressing down to pin it against the stone. In one fluid motion he brought his gun up from its holster and fired a single round into her throat, the bullet passing in less than a half inch away from where his foot was. The silver haired women gurgled blood for a split second, then collapsed.  
  
Reno stared at her for a moment, turned, and jogged off once again into the distance, trying to catch up to the rest of the Turks. 


	22. Hell

Rory had never been a fan of long, dark, ominous looking tunnels that suddenly appeared out of a wall of solid rock inside of mountains. This wasn't necessarily a pattern, this was the first tunnel of that particular sort shed ever actually come into contact with, but she didn't like the look- or the feel of it. The look was fairly obvious- nothing, it was nearly pitch dark inside, and the feeling was simply cold. Thus, it was with nagging reluctance and a backwards glance, hoping to see her brother approaching, that Rory fell into place entering the tunnel, gripping unconsciously onto the handle of the switch blade inside her pocket.  
  
They walked, not for long, but for longer than any of them would have liked, seeing no end to the tunnel they were in. The curves and twists inside it made it impossible to turn around and see how truly far they had come, but to everyone in side it definitely felt like twice as much as it possibly could have been in that amount of time. Only a few minutes after that feeling had hit them, Tseng signaled a stop to the Turks, and Avalanche- not feeling like continuing alone- followed suit.  
  
"Your brother picked these up where we stopped over in Wutai," Tseng explained to Rory, pulling two tightly bound packages from the walking pack he wore. "But I think they're for both of you."  
  
Cautiously but curiously, the two teenagers ripped open the string and pulled aside the brown paper, revealing a pair of brand new, navy blue business jackets. Startled, they looked up at Tseng, who had them both lined up with appraising looks. "Those aren't official, of course," he explained, "the last thing I need is two kids getting killed on my pay roll. But fuck it, they might bring some luck, huh?"  
  
Nodding numbly, Rory and Gabriel hastily pulled the jackets on over top of their shirts, a thin replacement for the winter wear they had abandoned as they traveled south down the continent. Though not tailor fit, Reno had certainly done a good enough job at guessing their sizes.  
  
"Now that..." there was a collective jump as the travelers turned to see Reno rounding a corner, his eyes gleaming, his smile stretched a little too wide to be real. "... is what I call looking sharp." He stepped diligently over Barret, who had sat down to take advantage of the momentary pause, and walked up to Rory's side. "Spitting fucking image," he grinned, " 'cept you aren't as pretty as me."  
  
"Yeah..." Rory said, her voice troubled. This wasn't exactly uncommon for her brother, it was just weird in a situation like this... must be nerves. Reno turned to Tseng, and gave him an inexplicable little head nod. "Lead the way, captain," he said, "we've got some pencil neck to fry."  
  
And, despite the wording, they did just that.  
  
***  
  
They walked so long in a series of twists and turns that always led into simply more winding rock, that when the path suddenly spilled out into an open room, it took all of them a few seconds to notice. When they did, it was with a sudden shock of wonder that rocked them all, and left their jaws firmly lowered.  
  
"What the fuck..." Reno muttered, echoing the feelings of many, if not all.  
  
The room, or cave, or whatever a hollowed out section of a mountain with perfectly smooth walls was called, was absolutely massive, stretching for what seemed like miles in every direction, whatever that may have been contained in the conclaves and sides hidden by deep and dark shadows, and by a several dots of invisibility- branching from the floor to the ceiling in long twisted spires were pillars of stone.  
  
"What is it?" Rude asked, scanning the stones with his sunglasses, seeing the room in a better light than anyone as the solids glew a dull shimmering green through his lens. He turned his head to the side, the image shifting, and slowly ran his finger around the rims on his glasses. On cue, the entire room lit up, but only to him, the by product of whatever God given magic was inside the glasses. "Wait..."  
  
"Its a web." A voice said, hushed, and the group looked as one towards Rory, who was staring around them with a look of abject horror on her face. "Its stones, but its... a spider web."  
  
"OK, time to leave..." Reno said, his voice hinting at humor, but he backed up as he spoke, drawing nearer towards the tunnel from whence they came. He continued to retreat, feet slowly passing back over each other, one hand firmly on the handle of his nightstick and the other clutching his gun. Something hit him, suddenly, between the shoulders, and he whirled, expecting to face an ambush. Instead he saw... a blank wall of stone.   
  
"Ah shit..." he said, his voice quiet. The entrance into this room had disappeared as if it had never been.   
  
A sudden, ringing boom echoed through the room, and the people who had turned to see Reno speak now spun around, facing once again the center of the room, where from the shadows suddenly appeared a massive mechanical segmented leg. It jutted up from the ground as if it grew from there, twisting back into the shadows and the darkness where it disappeared. Then there was a second boom, a second leg, and a third, a fourth, a fifth... and in one surging move, the creature that had once been Hojo stepped into their sight.  
  
He was twisted, more so than he ever had been... his spider legs, which had appeared smooth and seamless metal less than a week ago, were now amazingly intricate pillars of intertwining steel and pipes, interlocking nuts and bolts that formed an incredible mish mash of parts and segments. The body, which had been flawless and unadorned, was now bulging with an unnatural amount of muscle, its stomach twisted with edges and rivets like a cockroach. The face, which earlier had been featureless and plain, was perhaps the least changed... the only altercation now was a wide split mouth that cut right down the middle.  
  
The beast stood, as frozen as the horrified adventurers staring at it, framed perfectly in the shadows of the room. It radiated power, strength, and disturbingly enough a sense of nobility as it stood in perfect poise, before slowly raising its hands, which now looked curved, almost like hooks, up to its face. The eyeless skull stared at one hand, then the other, before settling its gaze on Cloud Strife, who stepped forward with his silver sword raised.  
  
"Hojo," it growled, "for every drop of blood you spilled in this city, we will make you pay tenfold."  
  
There was a frozen second, a moment of complete stillness. Then a small pop, and Cloud Strike was flung through the air, slamming into the stone wall with a thunderous clap.  
  
"Cloud!" Tifa cried, sliding to the ground beside him. He lay still, nearly comatose, and didn't answer her as she cried his name. Stunned, it took the Turks roughly a second to draw their pistols and level them at the creature, and open fire. Bullets spun through spiraled chambers and burst into the open air, a split second killer bore from a barren womb, and went with unerring accuracy directly towards the supposed head of the creature... before simply blinking out of existence more than a yard from their target. Entire clips emptied without a single bullet touching anything solid.  
  
Hojo, for his part, simply regarded them with silence.   
  
"Uh..." Tseng said slowly, his voice stalling for one of the few times Reno could remember, ever. He subconsciously twirled the staff from the Wutai sacred lands in his hand. "Fuck it. Were going in."   
  
Dropping his pistol freely to the ground, Tseng sprinted forward, quickly beginning to cover the distance between them and the beast. Before he had reached the halfway point, the others were in motion, cued by the uttered battle cry. While Tifa stayed behind, frantically trying to shake some sort of coherence into Cloud, members of the Turks, Shinra, and Avalanche alike sprinted towards a common enemy.  
  
Tseng, though in motion first, was no match for the sprinting skills of a Wutain ninja, and Yuffie outdistanced him right in the very end, pulling out her crystal chakram and leaping into the air to strike a moment before Tseng reared back his staff to swing. This essentially causes two things. First, it caused Hojo to casually twitch one massive leg, striking Yuffie in the abdomen and sending her twirling to the ground. Second, it allowed for Tsengs staff to strike a glancing blow off another leg, which while it didn't show any signs of actual damage, did instinctively jerk and knock the Turk leader five feet backwards.  
  
Stunned by the speed and viciousness of the counter attacks, the rest of the chargers paused for but a second, and then redoubled their speed. Cid Highwind leapt over one table sized foot and lashed out with both the Venus Gospel and the Neptune's Whim, drawing long, greasy streaks of oil across the makeshift skin of Hojo's under belly. Metal feet clamped and stomped all around the aging pilot, but he simply stuck beneath the center of the beast, out of its range. Flexing his legs for another huge leap, Cid once again buried the two spear points of his weapons into the underside of Hojo.  
  
"That's right spider boy... what now?" Cid growled in his aged and raspy voice, eyes wide and wild. "What the fu-"  
  
Cids mouth suddenly froze, along with the rest of him. He stood immobile for a brief moment, the only thing moving was his eyes, which rolled upward to see one of Hojo's long and bulgy arms pointing directly at him. For a split second he realized that it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to taunt the monster, but that split second disappeared as he went airborne, hurled off to the side like a record setting fast ball, the old pilot slamming with full force into the advancing Gabriel, and then both of they were flat on the ground.  
  
Elsewhere, Hojo was busy. Electricity sparkled out him and raced up his metal leg, and he was too preoccupied with the close range bullet shots of Rude to stop the flow of the current. He was too distracted by Reeves shotgun, which peppered him across his stomach, to stop those bullets, and he was too distracted by that damn irritating mechanical bird that simply refused to stop flying at his face, too fast to strike at, to stop the spray of shells from the shotgun barrel. And he was too distracted by all of this to do anything at all as Rory popped the dark green blade out of her switchblade, and buried it in one of the hundreds of pipes that ran through and around one of his eight legs.  
  
He froze, absolutely still, all activity ceased- the message he was receiving far more important than anything else that was happening-, as over ninety percent of his logical systems informed him that he was about to die. He didn't even need to look to realize that turgid green fluid had worked its way up his leg with unbelievable speed, and that the leg itself had been rendered immobile and useless because of it. Working fast, he simply allowed the leg to detach, molecules separating and the numb limb simply falling away... but it wasn't fast enough.  
  
The poison had entered Hojo's main system, and terror stricken, absolutely baffled at this sudden turn of events, he was forced to switch every ounce of energy he had into combating the neuro toxin that was racing its way to his brain.  
  
While he did that, Zack lined up his swing carefully. Something- he couldn't explain what it was- was flowing through his body, adrenaline concentrated, energy like he had never experienced before in his life. He rose the rush like a wave and launched up, twirling his Ultima Weapon in his sword, and then struck a single motion straight across the breast of the beast. Oil spilled out on him like rain, but he didn't stop moving, or even slow down. The sword worked in his hands too fast to see, and even the tendrils Hojo's very skin sent out as a method of defense were simply batted away with ease as he buried, twisted, and struck with his new weapon.  
  
It was all over in a flash second- both the attack and the battle. Zack landed back on the ground ungainly, almost allowing himself to fall, and the thing that Hojo had become fell eviscerated to the ground, oil rushing out of it like a damaged tanker. The adventurers who had been below it dove out of the way to safety, and were still coated with rivulets of the sticky black goo. Reno, for his part, simply lay back as it washed over him, too exhausted from the battle between his nightstick and one of Hojo's legs to move.  
  
"Well..." he whispered, "that was easy."  
  
"Yes." A voice came, a new voice, but familiar. "Disappointingly so."  
  
Reno sat straight up as the rest of the men and women- or those who were still standing- whirled on their feet. Stepping out of the shadows, feet padding lightly on the floor, and looking very much like his old self- was Hojo Hiroshima.  
  
***  
  
"Every time..." Hojo was speaking fluently, despite the fact he was walking through a half inch of oil with over a dozen weapons pointed at him. "I've built something in my life time that's truly remarkable, I've noticed a disturbing trend. You either destroy it, or its funding was cut. I'm sure there's a theorem about it somewhere, probably on the stupidity of humans."  
  
He continued walking, coming within an inch of Rudes pistol, seeming not to even notice as the barrel swung with every step he took to stay level with his temple. "Sephiroth... Gamma... in the end, my self, perhaps the greatest creation of all- but once again, you showed up in my lab, and cut me down before the Jenova cells had time to fully register. Tsk."  
  
On the ground, Cid slowly rolled over off to the fallen form of Gabriel, and cautiously began to shake the boy awake, keeping his eyes trained on the rambling scientist. "And then a miracle of science happens, the birth of man all over again, something worthy of a thousand bibles of text... chemicals mixed with cells, which mixed with elements... and I was born again, a modern day Lazarus. Or Lazarus' raiser, the virgin born himself, the master carpenter... because I was ready to build the greatest machine of all time."  
  
Several pairs of eyes twitched to the lying and shredded corpse of the spider monster they had just felled. Hojo saw them, and followed their gaze, only to laugh contemptuously. "No, not that... that was just my tank, the battering ram that would create the cracks the genius would pour through. Built of flesh and bone, true, but nothing compared to what I have... had... in the works. The ultimate computer, the ultimate machine, the ultimate experiment- the world."  
  
Reno snorted from his crouching position in the oil. "I think God beat you to that, slick."  
  
Hojo's eyes didn't even move, but it suddenly became apparent that, for the moment, he was fully focused on the red-haired Turk. "You don't believe in God. And even if you did, assassin, he wouldn't help you now, so bide your tongue. Not this world, this flawed imperfect place... but the ultimate world. A utopia, everyone working in perfect synergy, with perfect precision. Everyone would have their place, everyone would have a task, and things would be... perfect. Ultimate efficiency."  
  
"You're insane," said Reeve, phrasing the obvious for them all. "The world is a habitat, not a bee hive!"  
  
A momentary shudder ran through Hojo, and his fingers made the slightest of gestures towards Reeve. The public relations director reared back as if a snake coiling his spine for a strike, and was suddenly snapped maliciously into the rocky ground with a sickening thud. The others went to rush to his side, but were stopped dead by an invisible wall, some unseen force blocking the way.  
  
"As I was saying..." said Hojo, oozing arrogance, "perfect efficiency that was destroyed by you. You've killed my first wave of workers, the true breed of people I needed. Everything from now on will be tilted a millidegree or two to the left of what perfection truly is."  
  
"Criminals and psychopaths," Reno snarled, still struggling against the unseen force, if only as a sign of rebellion, "were your perfect breed of workers?"  
  
"Wrong," Hojo said simply, "just men and women without any natural conscience, lacking that ever destructive little voice of simpering pathetisism in the back of the mortal mind. Those willing to do whatever it took for the greater cause."  
  
"Greater fucking good!?" Reno cried, throwing his arms in the air in an act of indignation, but really in an attempt to get his hand behind him, next to Rory. He succeeded, and gestured for her knife, which she promptly handed him. "How is a world full of slaves and deluded scientists good!?"  
  
"I did not," Hojo explained, "say anything about greater good. I said greater cause. The cause of perfection, young fool, a world where everything is right, and everything that ever happens is expected."  
  
"Really?" Reno asked, tightening his hand into a fist, "expect this?"  
  
With those words he let the switchblade fly, dark green intertwining with black as the weapon whirled towards the air towards Hojo face. Casually, as if batting aside a fly, Hojo shrugged his shoulders, and the knife stopped dead in the air. It hovered for a moment, then dropped uselessly to the ground with a clang.  
  
"Yes. I did." Hojo sneered. "Expect this?"  
  
Another finger twitch, but Reno's assault was not near as unexpected as Reeve's had been- just more violent. The Turk rocked backwards through the air as if struck by a plane, only stopping when his foot brushed against an upraised rock and he went somersaulting to the ground, landing limp and still as a rag doll. Rory screamed his name and chased after, but Hojo twitched again, and a pillar of stone rose up beneath Rorys feet, sending the teenager hard into the dirt.  
  
"You know..." Rude said tersely, staring through his sun glasses. "It looks like he has a microchip in his chest."  
  
They looked at him, stunned by his sudden sentence, and confused by the words contained wherein. And then they perceived... and began to understand. As a whole, Barret, Rude, and Zack, the sole standers, charged at the scientist, who merely gestured towards the ground beneath their feet and pulled. The rock slid like a rug, and their legs went out, sending them down to the ground, dazed but not out- that is, until the same blanket of rock raised up above them like a tidal wave, and the force forming them disappeared, sending the stones cascading down upon them like concrete rain. It had only been a few violent moments, and Hojo stood alone.  
  
"You!"  
  
The scientist didn't turn, too preoccupied to be bothered with it, instead simply reformed himself so he was facing in the direction the voice had come from. Gabriel and Cid had struggled to their feet, and beside the aging pilot the young mans eyes blazed with hatred.  
  
"Gamma..." Hojo said, somewhere deep in his brain computing utter disbelief, "I wondered what had happened to you. I never dreamed one of my own creations would be put together in the doomed team sent to stop my efforts."  
  
"My name," the one Hojo had called Gamma snarled, "is Gabriel."  
  
"Right, right..." Hojo said, a sickening smile twisting his face. "A twist on your projects name, of course... phrased after one of the wonderful little altercations I gave you, wasn't it?"  
  
"What the hell is he talking about?" Cid demanded, staring at Gabriel, but was easily silenced with yet another twitch of Hojo's gaze, and this time the pilot showed no signs of getting up from his twisted spot ten feet to the left.   
  
"Altercations?" Gabriel said, not even glancing at the fallen Cid. "I think so, though I'm sure you know better than me that my memories a little spotty. This one, perhaps?"  
  
Something about Gabriel's transformations had always remained a mystery even to him. On one of the rare occasions when he actually had the slightest want to change, all he had to do was succumb to the urge that was building inside him and allowed the changes to happen. He'd always wondered what would happen if he grabbed hold of that urge, multiplied it in his mind, and then tried to force it with every fiber of his being. It was a question he'd never need to worry about again.  
  
To a normal person, it probably would have seemed instaneous, but Hojo was no normal person. He could comprehend things faster than anything on the planet, and he saw every millisecond crawl buy at a frozen pace the same necessary to take in the whole of Gabriel's change- the disappearance of the pupils, leaving blank white orbs for eyes, the suddenly split open shoulders, and new muscle mass... and, of course, the pair of eight foot wings that jutted out from the slits in the boys shoulders like spring snakes exiting a can. In less than a heartbeat, Gabriel stood before Hojo, a new man- if you could call him that- with a frenzied look on his face. "Yes," he snapped, "I believe it was this one."  
  
"Give it up Hojo," a voice came, breathless, from behind. Cloud stood wearily behind, Excalibur drawn but limp in his palm, and the ex Soldier was propped uncerimounisouly by Tifa Lockheart. "I think we all know this is the part where you get crushed." In a surge of energy, Cloud reared up, standing on his own, and hefted his silver weapon. Standing beside her husband, Tifa sprouted the steel claws out from her gloves, and held them threateningly in front of her.  
  
Hojo stared at all of them at the same time, even though they were on his opposite sides, his vision a perfect three hundred and sixty degrees. For a moment, he seemed nervous- and then that moment disappeared, gone forever, and he barked out an arrogant laugh.  
  
"I'm afraid you don't realize," he snorted, "pretty bird wings, shiny metal, and hopeless optimism notwithstanding, none of you stand a chance of getting within a dozen yards of me."  
  
"I wouldn't be so sure about that," a voiced boom, quiet but all encompassing. From the direction of the original tunnel two figures stepped, cloaked in shadows at first, but then revealed utterly as Aerith and Sephiroth in the dull light of the cave. "After all, I have quite a long sword."  
  
"You!" Cloud hissed, every joint in his body seeming to tighten up as his gaze fell upon the walking, breathing visage of Sephiroth. "You-"  
  
"Cloud." Aeris' voice was quiet, but absolute. "This will all be explained in due time. For the moment, we all need to focus on... him."  
  
Straining with every fiber of his being, Cloud managed to perform the minutest part of her request by shifting his eyes back to the scientist, who had yet to move since the two had entered the room.  
  
"Yes indeed..." Hojo said slowly, his smile gone, "focus on the scientist, the scholar, and let the mass murderer stand free. I'm surprised you got mixed in this, son."  
  
Sephiroth blinked, as if slapped by the very word. "I wish I could say the same about you," he snarled, "but I always knew you were crazy."  
  
Hojo's eyes widened and his nostrils flared, his demeanor the same as when Reeve had called him insane, and his reaction similar, but more extreme. First he twitched a finger in Sephiroth's direction, and then lifted his entire arm, seeming to be trying to reach out and strangle the Soldier with his bare hand. Whatever trick he was attempting, however, had failed... and it was just then he noticed the glowing staff in Aeris hand, and realized for a moment that he may have missed a few factors in his earlier calculations.  
  
"You think that can stop me!?" he spit, his voice rising, "you think you can stop me!?"  
  
"No," Aeris answered, her voice just as calm as ever, "but with them we can."  
  
Four figures emerged behind the Cetra and the Soldier, apparently following at a close but uneasy distance. Rufus came into focus first, and then Elena, her shoulder still caked with blood but apparently healed utterly by the powers of Aeris. Behind them, a tall, lanky figure, and a quadruped, who was signaled first by the flames flickering on his mane and his tale- Vincent Valentine and Nanaki had appeared at last. Vincent's eyes literally glew red as he stared upon his torturer, the man who had turned him into what he was.  
  
"Fools!" Hojo said, his voice growing hysterical. "You think because your Cetra friends little toy can keep me from striking you down, that you can destroy me? Be warned... I know how I appear, simply because it is how I choose to, but if I seemed to you as living stone the effect would still be far less imposing than my true self!"  
  
Aeris merely shook her head. "I'm sorry, Hojo," she whispered, "but the Planet has spoken. Your time here is done."  
  
It was a flash of movement, before a second, third, or fourth- impossible to track- chaos broke out, attacks closing in on the scientist from all sides. Silver swords ripped through arms, only for the same arm to strike the wielder into unconsciousness while twisting in the air. Angel wings beat the air as flames and ice worked in tandem, only for those wings to be seized and used as a handle to hurl the wearer against a wall. Masanume and staff struck simultaneously, only to be beaten back and beaten down with the sheer strength of the stricken's arms. Flamed mantles raged as teeth sunk into flesh, only for that same flesh to melt away from the teeth, seize them, and bash their muzzle into stone.  
  
Tifa fell before it even began, the first struck by the scientist. Cloud followed, then Gabriel, Aeris and Sephiroth, Red, all over powered and hurled away like children. Elena and Rufus, wielder of guns, lasted moments longer, but even as blood and flesh sprayed from the assaults of their guns, the skin healed, organs re-knit themselves, and Hojo advanced, and they too were soon beaten into the ground.  
  
After that, a single pairing, metal claw against invulnerable hand, gleaming red eyes against vision that saw all. Vincent Valentine moved faster than any human had a right to, but Hojo moved even faster still, and Vincent lacked the ability to instantly heal that Hojo possessed. In mere seconds both of them had taken more fatal wounds than experienced in some wars, but both stood, fueled by powers far beyond mortal.  
  
In the end, all that mattered was a simple duck. Reflexes increased, doubled, and redoubled since he had been careless enough to be shot by the scientist, Vincent dodged a single blow, and then came up with two clean hits, that snapped broke of Hojo's arms like toothpicks. The bones tried to fuse, but Vincent struck them again, and seized the throat of the immobilized scientist with his brass claw.  
  
"You've done a lot, Hojo," Vincent spoke, fully aware that while he did it was possible Hojo was returning to a state where he would be deadly, "you ripped out Lucrecia's heart, my own heart, and now you are attempting to the destroy the heart of the world. I think its time you knew what it felt like."  
  
Sensing his intentions, Hojo's newly whole arms flew forward to cover his chest, but with one mighty backhand to the crest of the scientists jaw, Vincent rocked his entire body back just the inch he needed. Claws pierced flesh, bone, and lung, until they came across their attempted goal- metal, and then seized and pulled.  
  
There was no final moment. No sudden realization of doom from the defeated monster. Just the simple, instaneous disintegration, millions of cells sliding effortlessly apart from each other as the only thing holding them together disappeared. In the end, all that there was left was Vincent Valentine, a small microchip in his hand, and carnage everywhere else. 


	23. Finale

"I still don't understand..." Clouds head was in his hands, much as they had been for the last hour or so, with one specific change. Earlier, it had been before the pains in his neck from the knockout blow he had taken that had been absolutely wracking his neck, even with Aeris's healing contributions. Now it was sheer frustration, as one more layer of his life had just been piled on that he didn't comprehend in the slightest.  
  
"Nothing," Aeris explained again, searching her mind for a way to phrase it that anyone who hadn't heard it directly from the planet could understand. "besides the power of the Planet itself can restore life to what has none. It doesn't matter what chemicals, elements, or substances are mixed to any degree in any situation. Hojo was not real, though he didn't know it himself."  
  
"Not *real*," Barret interrupted, snorting in indignation. His dignity was still smarting from the almost comical way Hojo had managed to dispose of him, and his skin was smarting from being half buried alive by rubble and stone. "I think we both know that some of the hits we took were real. I don't think anything that didn't exist could do any of that shit!"  
  
"I said wasn't real," Aeris corrected, "not that he didn't exist. Hojo was very much in this plane of the universe, but he just... well, he wasn't Hojo. Hojo died in the Meteor explosion in the core of Midgar, but his works, and his legacy, lived on."  
  
"His legacy?" Cloud asked, his mind absolutely blown, "who, Sephiroth?"  
  
"Not quite," Aeris said, "Hojo was quite possibly the most self important and self presumptuous man ever on the face of this earth. He thought that he would blow away every philosopher, every scientist, every revolutionary who came before him. Even in college, he kept memoirs of himself, recording some of the most painstakingly inane aspects of his day as if they would be plastered on billboards for all the future generations of the Planet to see. He continued these memoirs until a few hours before he died, actually spent his time recovering from your attack on him mumbling into the same tape recorder as always, refusing to let his death go unexplained."  
  
"So how did all this *happen*!?" Cid couldn't take the hints and the riddles anymore. Every bone in his body ached, and he hadn't had a decent cup of tea in weeks. His breaking point was very, very close. "Are you trying to say we got our asses kicked by some tapes?"  
  
"A microchip, actually." Aeris held it up, cleaned of the blood it had been stained with when first retrieved. Vincent had handed it to her after waking her up, and had promptly disappeared, but the small metal chip had told her all she needed to know. "He stores his memories by him at all times, in his pocket, in case anything remotely noteworthy happened, he would be ready to record it at a moments notice. His Jenova transformations didn't remove his clothes, they absorbed them, simply taking them into his body, the microchip included. And then came the explosion..."  
  
Aeris cleared her throat, doing nothing to clear the tension. Gathered around her in a half circle was Tifa Lockheart, Cloud Strife, Barret Wallace and Cid Highwind, her old companions in battle, looking absolutely baffled, the mystery of what they'd had to do still a riddle even after they had done it.  
  
"I'm not exactly sure what it was... perhaps the mako, the Jenova cells, or most likely some mix of both. It read the microchip, absorbing the data from the silicon, taking down all of the aspects of Hojo's life that he ever deemed necessary to remember- and he felt almost everything that involved him was necessary as such. Essentially, Hojo's entire mind was swimming around inside that substance... and all a mind needs is a body."  
  
"And that just happened to be Hojo's..." Cloud said, taking them to the next obvious but necessary step. "So he *was* reborn, and he *was* real!"  
  
"No!" Aeris insisted, her voice raising higher than she'd wished. "You don't understand. Hojo's mind had been destroyed beyond repair, and no microchip in the world is powerful recreate to take the place of an actual brain. He was a recording, simply the thoughts and wishes he had experienced in his past, all the different wants and whims of twenty years blended together in an organic machine. Perhaps more powerful than any real body, but the mind was limited and always would be, no matter what it thought of itself. So in the end..."  
  
"...so in the end, it lost." Tifa finished for her. "But all the work you did... gathering us all together... all the lives that the Planet restored were useless, and would have failed in the end- even the Legacy weapons- if it wasn't for Vincent and Red."  
  
"It wasn't my work," Aeris said, the ultimate corrector on this occasion, "it was the work of the Planet. I was, am, and always will simply be its messenger, chosen most likely because I had relationships with the men and women it needed to have its will be done. But I was not its only messenger. Nanaki is perhaps closer to the planet than any non Cetra should be, the blood that runs in his veins more ancient and nature based than any human. He heard the Planet's call, and did its work, finding Vincent."  
  
"...where was he, anyway?" Cloud asked. "We searched for him for months after Meteor, but he'd disappeared without a trace."   
  
"A second penance," Aeris said, her voice sad. "He'd killed the son of the women he loved, and he simply couldn't live with it. He went back to her cave and stayed their, living off the land, hiding from any who came to find him. You were all there several times, I believe, but he simply receded into the shadows again. I believe he saw you as people who had driven him to his sins."  
  
"But Red?" Cid asked, perhaps the closest thing to a friend Vincent had made on the Highwind, and even the grizzled old pilot sounded a bit wounded. "Red found him?"  
  
"Yes," Aeris said, "Nanaki went to the caves and offered aloud the two things that Vincent was always in search of. A final revenge against Hojo, even if in body only, and a chance to amend those he'd hurt by once again saving the world. It took him a while, but Nanaki was patient, and after a while Vincent emerged."  
  
"Did we?" Cloud asked, "save the world, I mean? Is this all good and safe for now?"  
  
Aeris looked around, a small smile on her face. "Yes," she said, "I believe it is."  
  
And with that, the Cetra stood, smoothed out her dress, and with a small wave good bye, she left.   
  
***  
  
Tyler was cold... he hated the cold. Normally he would have put his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, but that wasn't really possible at this point, as his arms were in very tight knit white sleeves and wrapped around his shoulders, and he honestly didn't have the effort in him to break his way out of the strait jacket. He stared blankly at the wall, wondering if he should be shivering, wondering if he was even really cold.  
  
Outside the door stood Reeve, looking furious at the pair of orderlies and the doctor who stood in front of him. He was roughly a split second from smacking the clipboard out of the arrogant fucks hands and then beating him to death with it. "What do you mean I can't take him home!?" he demanded, "You always said he could come if he wanted, and he does now!"  
  
"I'm sorry, Mr. Lucia..." the doctor placated him. "But with what you've told us since his return, and what we've managed to get out of him, he is a far more disturbed and dillusional boy than we ever had imagined before."  
  
"What the hell are you talking about!?" Reeve was practically screaming.  
  
"Well, sir, are you aware of the several on going law suits from the family of murders people towards companies that produce, say, violent video games?" the doctor asked.  
  
"Sure..." Reeve said, suddenly baffled about where this was supposed to be going. "They say it desensitizes the killers. What does that have to do with anything?"  
  
"As far as we can tell, Mr. Lucia, your son may be one of the very few cases where those law suits would succeed without question," was the only answer he got from the doctor.  
  
"I don't understand!" Reeve hissed. "My son didn't murder anybody!" They had, of course, concealed what happened under the mountain at Fort Condor, despite the knowledge that while it had been necessary for the fate of the world, because it would be hard to make anyone understand why a child with a history of mental illness had needed to go ballistic with a pair of gatling guns.  
  
"Do you know why, Mr. Lucia, your son passed out on your travels?" Reeve was really getting fed up with the way the doctor kept speaking in essentially the exact same sentences, with maybe two or three words changed around when the context of the question was different.  
  
"No! Why don't you tell me?"  
  
"Because he suddenly came into the recognition that what he was doing was real."  
  
"What? Of course he..." Reeve blinked. "What?"  
  
"It explains so much," the doctor said, "the difference in his psychological tests, his erratic behavior, his seemingly multiple personalities while the tests picked up no sign of any such thing..."  
  
In a sudden movement, Reeve seized the front of the Doctor's jacket, well aware but uncaring of the suddenly tense orderlies. "You'd better tell me something I can understand about my son," Reeve growled, "or you might find out that going crazy on someone is a genetic thing."  
  
Surprised, but relatively unshaken- he did work with mental patients, after all- the doctor put it into plain English. "Your son is not sure when his life is real, and when the things he is doing are part of an elaborate video game."  
  
Reeve let go of the mans jacket. "Excuse me?" he said, his voice quiet.  
  
"Fantasy and reality, the difference eludes him. Recent tests have confirmed it, tests so usually useless that they are almost never used unless called for... he suffers from an as yet unnamed syndrome. We believe it stems from dreams he has, visions so realistic that the afflicted is one hundred percent convinced when he awakes that they really happened. Living in two worlds, one where no rules apply and anything is possible, and another in his room, confined and helpless... it skewered the boy's view of the world, divided reality to him into millions of fragments, some real, some not."  
  
Reeve remained silent, staring at the man in wide eyed disbelief.  
  
"Its treatable, Mr. Lucia, but it will take months to know if the medications have been effective. When we are positive that his grasp on reality has been recreated, you can take him home."  
  
At a loss for words, Reeve could merely nod. The doctor realized his role here was done, and turned to leave, not even pausing as Reeve fumbled out muffled thanks. The public relations director and father walked up to the glass that peered into his sons room, and pulled aside the curtain.  
  
Tyler heard the curtain being drawn, and glanced over from his spot in the corner, eyes widening in surprise. He knows, Reeve thought to himself, that this is real. He understands that I'm actually here, that's why he's surprised. When didn't he? When did he think it was just a game? The last time I came here? The killings? Or did they sprout from real hidden demons that were now just masked by a medical condition?  
  
Tyler gave him a weak smile from his corner.  
  
Taking a deep breath, Reeve waved, and pulled open the door to enter.  
  
***   
  
Vincent Valentine was in a hurry. He was too close to the others, and was in severe danger of being found. The last thing he needed was a sappy, soulful goodbye, and thanks for doing what he had absolutely had to do. What would he have told them? That if it wasn't for his penance, his obligation, he would have said to Nanaki that the world be damned, he was staying in his cave? It would be the only thing of mild interest he'd even have to offer, and he doubted they'd like it very much. He doubted he liked it very much himself.  
  
He reached out with his left hand to brush aside a vine that was strung across the forest path, only to stop dead. The shining brass was still covered with blood, that had earlier been red and sticky, but now had faded and dried to a dull, rust colored brown on his claw. He lowered his eyes and the claw at the same time, ashamed of something he refused to name. Remembering his hurry, he brushed aside the vine with his right hand, and went to continue on.  
  
"Leaving so soon?"  
  
Vincent froze and straightened his up, his spine locking as if frozen. The very sound of the voice sent his nerves blazing, like a thousand angry little fires in the deep pores of his skin. It was the voice of a dead man, a man he had killed, the voice of a man who had once been a child that should have been his. But it was not, instead it was born to a psychotic scientist, a man Vincent had also killed... twice, now. Sephiroth, last name of Hiroshima by all official records, but be damned if you could find those records on this earth anymore.  
  
"I have things to attend to," Vincent said, speaking without turning. His eyes glew faintly in the shadows cast by the trees that loomed around both of them, narrowed into mere slits.  
  
"You no longer have anything to atone for," Sephiroth said simply, laying it all out in the open, "your penance was more than served, long before you even met the likes of Cloud Strike and Tifa Lockheart."  
  
"And what would one such as you know of atonement?" Vincent asked coldly, angrily. "You've posed danger to more lives than Hojo ever had. Aiding in stopping him is nothing in the scope of the things you've done."  
  
"That's where your wrong, Turk," Sephiroth said, using Vincent's old, forgotten title. Upon hearing it, the pale skin manned whirled around, his red cloak sweeping out and brushing the air clean.  
  
"I stopped being a Turk the same day I stopped being human, Sephiroth." Vincent snarled.  
  
"Listen to yourself, Valentine. You speak to me as if I am the man I once was, the misguided Soldier bent on destroying all the things that had ever tortured him- and a word, everything." Sephiroth's voice was quiet, and calm, but saturated with a noble sounding strength. "I am that man no longer. I have become a messenger of the Planet, though you try not to hear its words. It is intentions that count more than deeds, Valentine, and your intentions have always been in the right places."  
  
"And my deeds always in the wrong ones!" Vincent cried, "Or can you not understand that? You killed the inhabitants of a city and burnt it to the ground, but could you even comprehend the weight of not killing something you love, but instead destroying it? I turned Lucrecia, your mother, into an empty soulless wreck, because of my inability to act! Intentions mean nothing when the consequences make you something less than, than..."  
  
"Human," Sephiroth said, completing the words for him. The ex Soldier stood solemnly, his arms crossed over his chest, his features calm as he completed the final task that had been appointed to him. "You say that once again, but the only one who believes it is yourself, though Bahumat knows you try to convince others... tell me, Vincent, why do you wear that?" The silver haired warrior gestured towards the left hand of the man, where the bloodstained brass claw was poised.  
  
Vincent followed his gesture to the metallic limb silently, and when he tried to answer, no sounds came out. Instead he merely raised the claw up to eye level, clenched it, wiggled the fingers. In the end, he merely shrugged, an apparent gesture of defeat.  
  
"The others think it is sewn on, you know," Sephiroth told him, "they believe it is a part of you and always will be. But you know, and the Planet knows, much differently."  
  
Slowly, Vincent lowered the claw into the grasp of his right hand, and seized the metallic, sharp clawed fingers. With a slow, solid tug, the claw came loose, pulling free from the black gloved hand that lay beneath, altogether whole. Vincent stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at Sephiroth.  
  
"You are more human than most people could ever hope to be," Sephiroth said with finality, "and you are the only one who recognizes it not."  
  
Wordlessly, Vincent dropped the claw to the ground, and walked away, leaving it lying in the mud.  
  
***  
  
"So what now?"  
  
The voice was Reno's, but the words weren't typical of him. Thinking ahead was not exactly the running fashion of the Turk, just as strongly as dwelling in the past was almost entirely his fashion. And the present, well... the present was just a millisecond, and as soon as that millisecond was over it was the past, and Reno could begin to enjoy it.  
  
Tseng glanced over from his spot at the round wooden table, where he sat between Reno and Elena. "That depends," he said, "on any number of things." He paused for a moment from his relatively cryptic remark to take a drink from his Scotch. His eyes flickered around the table, falling finally on Rory and Gabriel, who each sat to the right of Reno, slowly nursing the drinks Reno had bought them on terms of the bet. The warrior smiled slightly at the evident distaste on the face of the girl, yet she drank on. "Such as membership," he said.   
  
The two teenagers perked up suddenly, eyes raising from their drinks to meet Tseng's gaze. "After all," he continued, "they already have the jackets."  
  
"Yeah, that's all it takes..." Elena snorted, trying to sound as good natured as possible. She genuinely liked the two teenagers, and had actually been the voice that helped soothe Reno's raging fears that Rory ever go into the same line of work as her older brother, but her shoulder was still killing her, even with Aeris's care she would need to look seriously into learning to shoot with the other arm. As for now, she wore a sling around her neck that cradled the arm, trying to keep pressure from further damaging the joint.  
  
Rory looked over expectantly at her brother, waiting for him to quickly brush off the idea, dismissing it as a simple joke even though she'd read in Tseng's eyes that it wasn't. Instead he simply reached over as if to tousle her hair, and then remembering she absolutely loathed that action, instead put his arm around his little sister. "You are so going to be a secretary," he said after a moment, a small smile on his face, but his tone serious. As if she'd had any believe they were going to be sending her out onto missions.  
  
"And me?" Gabriel asked quietly, his eyes locked firmly on the table a foot or two lower than Reno's eyes. He'd been wondering since he'd been awaken under the mountain, his wings long since receded, what he was going to do from then on. Any of the people and the places that he'd known were long since destroyed, his entire world located in a Midgar that existed thirty some years ago.  
  
Reno looked like he was going to answer him, probably with a comment on how he would be watching the door, but Tseng answered instead. "Something," he said simply, "you'll get the job that you should have gotten thirty years ago if only you hadn't been so damn trusting."  
  
At the word 'something', the confirmation that Gabriel did indeed have an immediate future, the young man had exhaled deeply and gone to take a gulp from his drink. By the end of Tseng's sentence, he had finished off the contents of the glass, but couldn't bring himself to put it down, instead staring at the man out of the cup's glass bottom. After a moment that felt like an eternity, he put the glass down, his eyes wide and stunned.  
  
"You were Tex, weren't you?" he asked in a distant voice, "the quiet one who never talked to any of us. Holloway had told me he'd already gotten you, right before I put a slug in his chest, so I thought..."  
  
"Bullshit." Tseng said simply. "You didn't want to kill the short runt who seemed so incompetent. You didn't realize that the short runt was just a very good actor."  
  
"And a very good shot..." Gabriel added. He looked around the table, where the Turks- the other Turks- were looking at him and Tseng with various levels of belief and understanding. Slowly, Gabriel reached out and grabbed the tall bottle that sat between them in the middle of the table, and refilled his glass. Idly, he lifted the cup, and swished the brown liquid for a moment.  
  
"Well here's to that," he said, offering his glass for a toast. "And here's to something."  
  
Glasses clinked, and even Rory drank to that.  
  
***  
  
Yuffie waited outside the bar, listening to the sound of chemically fabricated joy inside, staring out into the darkened sky with an uneasy gaze. She didn't know why she was waiting, or until when, but she did know what she was waiting for- him. That bumbling, stupid, crass, lower class idiot. It was probably pointless, she knew, but she was going to wait until the Turks left the bar and she was going to grab him, and she was going to tell him to take her to dinner, or she was going to kick his ass.  
  
After all, she'd already slept with him. It was the least he could do.  
  
***  
  
It was like a giant, all encompassing mirror, nature painted in perfect detail and slapped onto one of the biggest canvasses in the world. And then, with one stone throw, Rufus destroyed it all, sending it into thousands of little ripples that would keep going even when they were too small to see, would eventually make their way to the oceans, cause waves, cause tidal waves, cause deaths. But Rufus didn't care about the ripples, or the reflection in the lake he had just taken out with stones toss.  
  
"You look cold."  
  
The voice was soft, too soft, faint enough that in Rufus' mind, it meant weak. Tenderness is one thing, acting like some sort of baby rabbit was an entirely different matter. Softness of that degree could only mean two things, pity or lying, or usually a blend of both. Men and women pretending pity while they were really reaching for the handle of the dagger in your back to give it one more good twist. He didn't bother to look backwards, the pink clad women was already shown perfectly in the reflection of the water.  
  
"Aeris." He said, an acknowledgment, not a greeting. "It's about ten degrees out here, and we're at lake side. Recently deceased or not, I think by the laws of physics that I need to be cold."  
  
He grabbed another stone from the pile he had erected from his perch on the larger rock and whipped it side armed towards the water, where it hit the surface at too steep an angle and simply sliced into the water, disappearing from sight beneath the mirror image of some tries. Uttering an angry sigh, he grabbed yet another rock, and tossed it again. This time it managed to skip once on the water, and then disappeared once again.  
  
"You don't look very good at that," Aeris said softly, walking up beside him.  
  
"Out of practice," Rufus said with a weak shrug, tossing another rock, another sinker. "I used to be able to clear an entire lake this size. That's before more important things came into my life than adding stones to the bottom of a pond."  
  
"So why are you doing it now?" Aeris asked, "Trying to get in touch with your old skills?"  
  
"This isn't a skill," Rufus informed her, "it's a trick. Anyone can do it if they know how. And if you must know," he added that second part quickly, cutting off Aeris as she opened her mouth to speak, "I'm doing it because now there *isn't* anything more important in my life than this."  
  
"You saved the world," Aeris argued.  
  
"I helped." Rufus said flatly, just a twinge of caring in his voice. "I played nurse and then did some damage to Hojo's fist with my jaw bone. Not exactly a hero's role."  
  
"And you want to be a hero?" Aeris asked, surprised.  
  
"No." He said, and then froze. Did he? "No... I just don't want to be inert. I don't care if I was fighting Hojo or on his side, the role of a lackey doesn't appeal to me."  
  
"And throwing stones does."  
  
"Maybe..." Rufus sighed, grabbed a whole fistful of rocks at once, and let them fly. A half dozen splashes popped up about fifteen feet out into the water, sending ripples going in every direction. "Its all I have to do. My company has been taken over. Most of my old employees were killed, anyway. Everything I created is now considered evil by the people who's lives they saved. And now I can't even skip these fucking rocks!"  
  
With a shaky hand, he smacked the rest of his pile away, sending them cascading over the side of his boulder into the dirt. In a convulsive move, he seized his hair around the temples and gripped tightly, angrily lowering his head towards the rock and gritting his teeth. "I'm the only one here," he said, "who was just as much use dead as he is now."  
  
Aeris ignored his second comment, focusing on his first. Idly, she reached into the pocket of his white lab coat, and slowly withdrew the flat metal disk he had taken days ago in the underwater Mako Reactor. A question he hadn't asked, but she knew what was on his mind, was why it had been of no use whatsoever in helping in the mission against Hojo. Gently but determined, she grabbed his wrist and pulled it away from his temple, and pressed the disk into his palm. He looked at her in uncomprehending surprise.  
  
"Skip it," she said simply, and took a step back.  
  
He had a million questions, but he suddenly realized that he didn't really care. He cocked his arm back and side armed the disc, watching it jet through the air like a Frisbee. There is no way, he thought to himself, that is going to skip. It is at a horrible angle. But suddenly, it caught the wind, or the wind caught it, and it flattened out before striking the surface of the water, skimming it perfectly in small hops. Rufus watched it go, flying into the distance, until it disappeared from sight, and all he was left with was a broken reflection. His gaze lingered as the water smoothed, and the reflection pieced it back together: a girl, sitting on a dock, her legs dangling over the edge.  
  
His nerves suddenly screaming, he looked up, staring in disbelief at the image across the lake.   
  
A women sat their, on an old beaten down dock that had absolutely no place in the center of a lake. Her hair was black, long and shining, but Rufus could remember like yesterday when it had been short and curly, dirty in an almost pleasant way. Even in the darkness he could see the shimmering of her dark blue eyes, and could just make out the faintest hint of freckles on her pale skins.  
  
"Shea..." he said weakly, breathlessly, barely able to hear himself. At an utter loss, he turned to Aeris for help, only to find that the Cetra was gone, disappeared without a trace. He looked back towards the dock, praying to all things holy that it was still there, only to discover that... it was, as solid as ever, strong in the moonlight. Fighting his lungs, which felt like they were burning with indescribable fire, he cupped his hands to his mouth. "Shea!!" his scream raced through the night, passing over the lake like wind.  
  
In an almost unobservable movement, the women looked up from the dock, a small and shy smile on her face. She lifted her hand, in what could have been a greeting, and then slowly cocked her finger towards the dock, towards her. The unspoken message was clear.  
  
Come.  
  
The former president didn't hesitate. He could remember a time where he had refused to walk on such a dock in fear that his shoes would get muddy, and of course the girl with him had come up with the perfect solution- take 'em off, dummy. He leapt down from the rock, pulling his jacket off as he dropped, tossing it to the side when he landed. He ran towards the water, kicking his shoes off as he did, and dived in, ignoring the icy pinch that hit him on every square inch of bare skin.  
  
He swum hard, conditioned by years of mandatory lessons from his father. Stupid, of course, as president he had never had less than five men who were registered scuba divers, who probably wouldn't even have let him touch the water. They'd swim with him on their backs, or something. He kicked hard, cutting through the water like a trout, reaching the dock in a matter of minutes. He reached up from the water and seized the brim of the wood, and then hauled himself up with one energized pull.  
  
He rolled onto the dock easily, and wiped the water from his eyes, half expecting that when he did, he would suddenly wake up in the Shinra Mansion, his father pounding on the door and screaming at him. Instead, he sat up to see a pair, *the* pair, of dark blue eyes staring at him.  
  
"Shea..." he said again. "Wha... what? You..."  
  
"I'm here, Rufus..." she said, her voice sounding giddy but restrained. Like maybe she didn't believe it herself. "I'm here."  
  
Almost taken aback for a moment at the lack of the lisp, Rufus suddenly remembered how long ago she'd lost it. Would he ever stop remembering her as the homeless little girl who he met when he was just eight?  
  
And then her restraint broke, and she grabbed him, and kissed him, and he kissed her back.  
  
And he realized that yes, he would.  
  
***  
  
The fire crackled in the night, causing Zack to jump a little. His nerves were frayed, and he wasn't sure they'd ever be quite normal again. He'd gone through a lot in the last few weeks, maybe more than the others with almost being drowned in some god forsaken power plant. And now, here he was, alone in the middle of a forest near a mountain he'd just nearly died under.  
  
"I guess I'll go home..." he said quietly, staring at the flames. Idly, he glanced around.  
  
"Whichever way that is."  
  
THE END  
  
  
  
-Tiger Rhodes  
www.geocities.com/suasniper 


End file.
